GOOGLE EARTH ENGINE BASED AGRICULTURAL DROUGHT MONITORING IN KODAVANAR WATERSHED, PART OF AMARAVATHI BASIN, TAMIL NADU, INDIA

Abstract. The agricultural drought assessment and monitoring has become a prime concern in recent times as it impedes land capability and causes food scarcity. Therefore, the present study constructed a methodological framework through the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, which offers advanced and effective monitoring in a timely concern of the drought occurrences. The study has been carried out in the Kodavanar watershed, a part of the Amaravathi basin is noted with signs of drought such as insufficient rainfall and vegetation stress in the current situation. The remote sensing indices are utilised for the agriculture drought assessment including Land Surface Temperature (LST), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Temperature Condition Index (TCI), Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) and Vegetation Health Index (VHI). In particular, the VHI results show that the area of healthy vegetation and no drought category is rapidly decreased from 934.29 to 107.83 sq.km across the years and have been reached threatening condition as extreme drought category with extremely low vegetation cover has been increasing in a exponential proportion of over 5% in the year 2019 and 2020. However, the agriculture drought results compared through the meteorological drought indicator of Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) reflects that the SPI and VHI are reflecting similar signs and indicating the dry condition of precipitation with moderate vegetation over the highlighted regions of northern tip and central eastern portions. This present work illustrates the effective use of the GEE platform in monitoring the agriculture drought and the highlighted portions of the study should be implemented with proper water resource management by the researchers, planners and policymakers in the Kodavanar watershed for reducing the vegetation stress.