Validating the Modified Perpendicular Drought Index in the North China Region Using In Situ Soil Moisture Measurement

Soil moisture content is one of the most important variables for monitoring and assessing the drought condition. In this letter, a modified perpendicular drought index (MPDI) derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite data was validated using in situ soil moisture measurements in Henan province of North China. The soil moisture at different depths of a soil layer and time lag on usefulness of the MPDI for estimating soil moisture content was analyzed; the effectiveness of the MPDI was evaluated with the observed soil moisture content and the comprehensive drought index K for different soil types. The results showed that the MPDI was significantly correlated with soil moisture content for the top soil layer with 10 cm depth. For a time lag ranging from 0 to 4 days, the correlation of MPDI to soil moisture was significant with no time lag in the depth of top 10 cm (r = -0.867). For the stations of the same soil texture type of loam, the correlation coefficient between MPDI and soil moisture is higher than that of all soil texture types. In a regional scale, the MPDI reflected an obvious spatial pattern of drought under different growing stages in the drought years over the study area.

[1]  Wei Li,et al.  The Cloud Detection Study of MODIS Based on HSV Color Clustering Algorithm , 2011, 2011 International Workshop on Multi-Platform/Multi-Sensor Remote Sensing and Mapping.

[2]  S. Idso,et al.  Canopy temperature as a crop water stress indicator , 1981 .

[3]  C. Justice,et al.  Development of vegetation and soil indices for MODIS-EOS , 1994 .

[4]  Y. Knyazikhin,et al.  The ‘‘RED versus NIR’’ Plane to Retrieve Broken-Cloud Optical Depth from Ground-Based Measurements , 2004 .

[5]  Abduwasit Ghulam,et al.  Drought monitoring in Iran using the perpendicular drought indices , 2012, Int. J. Appl. Earth Obs. Geoinformation.

[6]  Kaniska Mallick,et al.  Estimating volumetric surface moisture content for cropped soils using a soil wetness index based on surface temperature and NDVI , 2009 .

[7]  B. Gao.  NDWI—A normalized difference water index for remote sensing of vegetation liquid water from space , 1996 .

[8]  Qin Qiming,et al.  Soil line automatic identification algorithm based on two-dimensional feature space , 2012 .

[9]  Q. Qin,et al.  Modified perpendicular drought index (MPDI): a real-time drought monitoring method , 2007 .

[10]  Li Li,et al.  Advances in estimation methods of vegetation water content based on optical remote sensing techniques , 2010 .

[11]  Mehdi Hosseini,et al.  Multi-index-based soil moisture estimation using MODIS images , 2011 .

[12]  Qiming Qin,et al.  Estimating crop water stress with ETM+ NIR and SWIR data , 2008 .

[13]  Zhiming Zhan,et al.  Designing of the perpendicular drought index , 2007 .

[14]  Dara Entekhabi,et al.  Analysis of Feedback Mechanisms in Land-Atmosphere Interaction , 1996 .

[15]  Christopher Conrad,et al.  Understanding Hydrological Repartitioning and Shifts in Drought Regimes in Central and South-West Asia Using MODIS Derived Perpendicular Drought Index and TRMM Data , 2014, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.

[16]  W. Kustas,et al.  A verification of the 'triangle' method for obtaining surface soil water content and energy fluxes from remote measurements of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and surface e , 1997 .

[17]  J. Muller,et al.  Terrestrial remote sensing science and algorithms planned for EOS/MODIS , 1994 .

[18]  Josef Eitzinger,et al.  Agricultural drought monitoring in semi-arid and arid areas using MODIS data , 2011, The Journal of Agricultural Science.

[19]  J. Clevers,et al.  The robustness of canopy gap fraction estimates from red and near-infrared reflectances: A comparison of approaches , 1995 .

[20]  S. Running,et al.  Developing Satellite-derived Estimates of Surface Moisture Status , 1993 .

[21]  Changsheng Li,et al.  Mapping paddy rice agriculture in southern China using multi-temporal MODIS images , 2005 .

[22]  Niu Zheng,et al.  Evaluating Soil Moisture Status in China Using the Temperature/Vegetation Dryness Index（TVDI） , 2003, National Remote Sensing Bulletin.

[23]  Samuel N. Goward,et al.  Evapotranspiration from combined reflected solar and emitted terrestrial radiation: Preliminary FIFE results from AVHRR data , 1989 .

[24]  S. Vicente‐Serrano,et al.  Mapping soil moisture in the central Ebro river valley (northeast Spain) with Landsat and NOAA satellite imagery: a comparison with meteorological data , 2004 .

[25]  Qiming Qin,et al.  A re‐examination of perpendicular drought indices , 2008 .

[26]  J. C. Price.  Using spatial context in satellite data to infer regional scale evapotranspiration , 1990 .