On the Relation between Satellite Soil Moisture and Crop Production During Drought Events in India
Abstract
Soil moisture represents one of the most suitable indicator to assess agricultural drought as plants start to wilt when there is not enough moisture to support evapotranspiration demand. Given that, many authors have started using soil moisture data from surface/hydrological models and more recently, from active and passive microwave sensors to assess agricultural drought conditions. Objectives of this study are i) to assess the ability of a Standardized Soil Moisture Index (SSI) built with the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) satellite soil moisture dataset (Dorigo et al., 2017) in explaining maize and wheat crop production variability in India, and ii) to compare it with the performance of a SSI built with the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA-2, Gelaro et al. 2017) soil moisture and a classical Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI; McKee et al, 1993) obtained with ground-based rainfall observations. The study is carried out from 1998 to 2015 over Maharashtra and Karnataka states. Results show that soil moisture is generally much more informative about crop productions with respect to rainfall and it is also highlighted the higher capacity of SSI-CCI respect to other indices in estimating yield reduction during drought years. Furthermore, satellite soil moisture observations seem to better explain crop yields reductions than land surface models (i.e., MERRA-2) especially for irrigated crops (i.e., wheat).
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B51N2430M
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0480 Remote sensing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1812 Drought;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGY