Visualizing East Africa Drought and Vegetation Response in GIS using NASA Satellite Data

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) provides extensive and timely estimation of precipitation at high spatial and temporal resolutions. The TRMM data products, ranging from near real-time to monthly average, are valuable in mapping and monitoring of drought events. Geographic information systems (GIS) has been widely used in drought related modeling and applications However, the TRMM data products have been under utilized by the GIS community, partly because most TRMM data are archived and distributed in generic binary and native Hierarchical Data Format (HDF), which are not directly addable to widely used GIS software packages. In this presentation, we'll show how the TRMM precipitation data can actually be readily imported into a GIS and be integrated with other types of spatial data, such as watershed and administrative boundaries, to map, visualize, and analyze drought events. We'll present, in a GIS environment, how the 2010-2011 East African drought, which caused significant decrease in crop production and left more than 10 million people in need for food assistance, is clearly captured by TRMM measurements; how the region's vegetation growing conditions, as depicted by NASA's normalized difference vegetation index data product which is archived in HDF-EOS format, respond to the drought; and how the drought and the vegetation response can be visualized and assessed at different watersheds in GIS.