A Customized GIS Application to Create and Analyze Drought Characteristics using Geoinformation Technologies
India is an area where drought is common with about 68% of
the country prone to varying degrees of drought. Droughts in India harshly affect the economy
and people, often resulting in a large loss of human life and starvation. With the aim to improve their understanding
of drought and ability to detect when one is beginning, the researchers of this
article investigated various indices for drought applied to two past droughts
in 2002 and 2005.
The authors utilized the Normalized Difference Vegetation
Index (NDVI), the Aridity Index (AI), and the Standardized Precipitation Index
(SPI) in order to compare the three indexes and see how useful they were in
predicting and identifying droughts.
While the methods are similar, each one has slightly different
parameters regarding classifying drought with the inputs being a combination of
mean temperature, precipitation, vegetation, and evapotranspiration. Using GIS, they applied these indexes to the
2002 and 2005 drought in the Andhra Pradesh state of India.
After mapping out both of the droughts according to each
index, the authors found that there was a good correlation between the three
methods with only some variations and oddities.
They also found that using all three indexes was a good way to monitor
and manage drought when it occurs.
It would be interesting to see a study like this applied to
Texas, another drought prone place…
Source:
Ram Mohan Rao, K., Kant, Y., Saha, S. K., Dodikhudoev, I., Roy, P. S. (2012). A Customized GIS Application to Create and Analyze Drought
Characteristics using Geoinformation Technologies. International Journal of Geoinformatics. 8(2), 13-23. From http://web.a.ebscohost.com.navigator.southwestern.edu:2048/ehost/detail?vid=3&sid=6e58da3e-fe15-4c76-ae12-bebd2762372c%40sessionmgr4001&hid=4214&bdata=JmxvZ2luLmFzcCZzaXRlPWVob3N0LWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=77706930
No comments:
Post a Comment