Preliminary assessment of an integrated SMOS and MODIS application for global agricultural drought monitoring

Abstract: An application of the Soil Moisture Agricultural Drought Index (SMADI) at the global scale is presented. The index integrates surface soil moisture from the SMOS mission with land surface temperature (LST) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from MODIS and allows for global drought monitoring at medium spatial scales (0.05 deg).. Biweekly maps of SMADI were obtained from year 2010 to 2015 over all agricultural areas on Earth. The SMADI time-series were compared with state-of-the-art drought indices over the Iberian Peninsula. Results show a good agreement between SMADI and the Crop Moisture Index (CMI) retrieved at five weather stations (with correlation coefficient, R from -0.64 to -0.79) and the Soil Water Deficit Index (SWDI) at the Soil Moisture Measurement Stations Network of the University of Salamanca (REMEDHUS) (R=-0.83). Some preliminary tests were also made over the continental United States using the Vegetation Drought Response Index (VegDRI), with very encouraging results regarding the spatial occurrence of droughts during summer seasons. Additionally, SMADI allowed to identify distinctive patterns of regional drought over the Indian Peninsula in spring of 2012. Overall results support the use of SMADI for monitoring agricultural drought events world-wide.