Monitoring agricultural drought using combined drought index in India

Long period data and information indicate that India faced number of droughts-like situation from colonial period. A number of indices have been developed nationally and internationally to monitor agricultural drought based on remote sensing; however, to predict the onset of agricultural drought and its evolution and monitoring in time and space in a more efficient way qualitatively, Combined Drought Index (CDI) has been developed using meteorological, land based and remote sensing observations. In this study, an effort has been made to monitor agricultural drought based on exploitation of new data, methodologies and metrics that would aid the experts to make best judgments of regional-scale drought conditions through CDI using geospatial technology. The present study has been carried out for three consecutive years of 2014, 2015 and 2016 in five states (Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Maharashtra and Telangana) in India at district level for southwest monsoon season when rainfed kharif crops are grown extensively across the above-mentioned states in India. CDI gives a synthetic and synoptic overview of the drought situations using a classification scheme derived from various individual indices as it has been developed to combine the strength of various indices.