Abstract
Drought or dryness occurs due to the accumulative effect of certain climatological and hydrological variables over a certain period. Droughts are studied through numerically computed simple or compound indices. Vegetation condition index (VCI) is used for observing the change in vegetation that causes agricultural drought. Since the land surface temperature has minimum influence from cloud contamination and humidity in the air, so the temperature condition index (TCI) is used for studying the temperature change. Dryness or wetness of soil is a major indicator for agriculture and hydrological drought and for that purpose, the index, soil moisture condition index (SMCI), is computed. The deviation of precipitation from normal is a major cause for meteorological droughts and for that purpose, precipitation condition index (PCI) is computed. The years when the indices escalated the dryness situation to severe and extreme are pointed out in this research. Furthermore, an interactive dashboard is generated in the Google Earth Engine (GEE) for users to compute the said indices using country boundary, time period, and ecological mask of their choice: Agriculture Drought Monitoring. Apart from global results, three case studies of droughts (2002 in Australia, 2013 in Brazil, and 2019 in Thailand) computed via the dashboard are discussed in detail in this research.
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Data availability
All the datasets are available in the repository of Google Earth Engine. The details and specifications of each dataset have already been mentioned in the datasets.
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Supervision, project administration, writing-review and editing, and validation were performed by Dr. Hammad Gilani. Data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software, visualization, and writing-original draft were the duty of Ramla Khan. The main idea of the research was the combined effort of both authors.
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Khan, R., Gilani, H. Global drought monitoring with big geospatial datasets using Google Earth Engine. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 17244–17264 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12023-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12023-0