In this article, the performance of the Visible and Shortwave infrared Drought Index (VSDI), a drought index recently developed and validated in Oklahoma, United States, is further explored and validated in China. The in-situ measured soil moisture from 585 weather stations across China are used as ground-truth data, and five commonly used drought indices are compared with VSDI for surface drou...

BacKground A number of fire danger rating systems, which integrate selected quantifiable factors contributing to fire danger, have been developed to provide numerical indices relating to fire protection needs. it is important to note that fire danger indices have no real physical manifestation – they are just indices. Calculation of fire danger indices generally rely on information relating to ...

The goal of the research reported here is to assess the capability of satellite vegetation indices from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer onboard both Terra and Aqua satellites, in order to replicate live fuel moisture content of Southern California chaparral ecosystems. We compared seasonal and interannual characteristics of in-situ live fuel moisture with satellite vegetation ...

The objective of this study is to develop a novel methodology integrating remote sensing, geographic information system technology and local spatial autocorrelation geo-computation for quick drought assessment. One group of drought indices, based on the condition of the vegetation, includes the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Anomaly of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDV...

A synergistic fusion of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) L2 soil moisture with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-derived land surface temperature (LST) and several water/vegetation indices for agricultural drought monitoring was tested. The rationale of the calculation is based on the inverse relationship between LST and vegetation condition, related in turn w...

Wheat improvement for drought tolerance requires reliable assessment of drought tolerance variability among segregating populations. One hundred and fifty-one F3 and F4 families of durum wheat derived from a cross between Oste-Gata (as drought tolerance) and Massara-1 (as susceptible) genotypes were evaluated both under moisture stress (E1) and non-stress (E2) field environments using a randomi...

Drought is one of the major natural hazards that bring about billions of dollars in loss to the farming community around theworld each year. Drought is most often caused by a departure of precipitation from the normal amount, and agriculture is often the first sector to be affected by the onset of drought due to its dependence on water resources and soil moisture reserves during various stages ...

The zoning of phenomena based on geographical location has a long history; any geographical zone is a part on ground level, which possesses noticeable internal consistency in terms of its existing phenomena and processes. Agroclimatic zoning is mainly purposed to determine agroclimate regions and to evaluate these zones based on their relative utility in order to cultivate varieties of agricult...

Vegetation moisture and dry matter content are important indicators in predicting the behavior of fire and it is widely used in fire spread models. In this study, leaf fuel moisture content such as Live Fuel Moisture Content (LFMC), Leaf Relative Water Content (RWC), Dead Fuel Moisture Content (DFMC), and Leaf Dry Matter Content (LDMC) (hereinafter known as moisture content indices (MCI)) were ...