Vegetation Condition Index based Agricultural Drought mapping over the past decade of Sri Lanka by utilizing the Satellite Remote Sensing

Abstract

Drought is one of the main disasters that act as a silent killer among Sir Lanka and it is the disaster that affects the highest number of people over the country. Further can identify different types of droughts such as Meteorological drought, Hydrological drought, Agricultural drought, physical Drought, and Socio- economic drought. Under the investigation explored the agricultural drought of Sri Lanka since Sri Lanka is an agricultural nation andit requires systematic and scientific investigation to study the magnitude of the Agricultural drought. Sri Lanka is one of the Asian countries which is often experienced in drought risks, when drought has happened it is constantly changed into disaster making various antagonistic effects on the network. The integration between Remote sensing techniques and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was used for the investigation which is sophisticated in environmental studies rather than field data collection. Integration between 10 years (2009 to 2019) of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) remote sensing images were utilized for Agricultural drought detection by using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) for the study in ArcMap 10.1 software environment. As a result of the study presented an Agricultural drought risk assessment map for 2019 in Sri Lanka. Rendering to the results, it shows a considerable increase in drought conditions over the past decade of Sri Lanka while showing the dominant type is still no drought condition of 68% from the total area.