Governing agricultural drought: Monitoring using the vegetation condition index

Abstract

This paper investigates the spatial and temporal aspect of seasonal agricultural drought in Ethiopia during the cropping season using Vegetation Condition Index. SPOT-VGT S10 NDVI time-series for the period 1998 to 2013 was employed. Five hundred and sixty-seven dekadal images were administered in order to produce the multi-temporal agricultural drought maps. Accordingly, the analysis showed different causes for the nation-wide drought events occurred in the years 1998, 2000, 2002, 2009, and 2010. The study provides key information on the major historical agricultural droughts in Ethiopia by differentiating over the crop cycles and is able to geographically identify the regions most exposed to recurrent cycle of drought events.

Key Words: Drought, Vegetation, Remote sensing, NDVI, VCI