A Remote Sensing Based Global

Agricultural Drought Information

System (GADIS)
Meixia Deng, Liping Di, Weiguo Han, Ali Yagci,
Chunming Peng
Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, MS 6E1, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA

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Outline
Introduction
Current Systems and Limitations
Project Objectives
Methodology and Approaches
System Architecture and Implementation
Demonstration and Validation
Conclusion
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Drought Types and Definitions

Drought is a common weather phenomenon, yet one of the
most expensive natural hazards.
Types of droughts based on disciplinary perspectives:
Meteorological drought Precipitation deficit
Hydrological drought Stream flow or runoff deficit
Agricultural drought water supply deficit that affects crop
production or the ecology of the range
Socioeconomic drought A manifestation shatters the economy
and sociopolitical situation

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Distinguished Drought Features

Intensity (drought severity index)
Duration
Spatial Coverage

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Agricultural Drought
Factors affecting agricultural drought:

Climate/weather (Evaporation, Precipitation, Temperature)

Soil (Type, Moisture)
Crops (Species, Stage of Development)
Irrigation Capacity (Facilities, Water Resource)

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Current Systems
Canada
Europe
China
Africa

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Limitations on Current Systems

Not compliant with open standards

Not interoperable with GEOSS

Coarse spatial and temporal resolution

Most of them only at regional level

Limited drought information dissemination

only map view

No drought data customization and download

No or limited service/analysis capabilities

Separate and incompatible services

Lack of historical drought data analysis
Inefficient drought prediction and estimation

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Project Objectives
To overcome limitations of the current systems in
agriculture drought monitoring and forecasting through
leveraging the latest Web service, geospatial
interoperability and cyber-infrastructure technology and
utilizing historical and near real-time satellite remote
sensing data from data sources like NASA and NOAA .
To establish a system as a societal benefit area (water
and agriculture) prototype of GEOSS for providing
global, on-demand and systematic agriculture drought
information to users worldwide.
To support decision-making with improved monitoring,
prediction, and analysis of agriculture drought.

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Methods (I)
Remote sensing based drought monitoring:

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)

NDVI =

Vegetation Condition Index (VCI)

VCI =

NDVI NDVI min

*100
NDVI max NDVI min

Temperature Condition Index (TCI)

TCI =

NIR VIS
NIR + VIS

BT BTmin
*100
BTmax BTmin

Vegetation Health Index (VHI)

VHI = (VCI ) + (1 )TCI

Agriculture drought severity index based on VHI

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Methods (II)
Integrating satellite, climate, and biophysical data
Satellite Data
NOAA AVHRR (since 1981), MODIS (since 2000), NOAA GOES (to be tested)
Calibrated Data NASA MEaSUREs Project: Vegetation Phenology and Vegetation
Index Products from Multiple Long Term Satellite Data Records
VIP Research Group, University of Arizona (to be released).

Climate Data
Precipitation, Temperature, etc

Biophysical Characteristics
Land Cover, Soil Moisture (type, erosion), Irrigation Utilities, Water Resources

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Methods (III)
Drought forecast utilizes a neural network based modeling
algorithm:
The algorithm is trained with inputs of current and historic
vegetation-based and climate-based drought index data,
biophysical characteristics of the environment, and time-series
weather data.
The trained algorithm will establish per-pixel model for
drought forecast.
The model will produce on-demand drought forecast in ~1km
or higher spatial resolution, covering whole world by using
weather forecast as the input.

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System Architecture
Data
Retrieval

Data
Archives

Near Real
Time
Satellite
Data

Pre-process

Calibrated
Data

GEOSS Registries

Access
Data
Retrieval

Calculation

Map
Generation

Calculation
SPI, PDSI
etc

NDVI, VCI,
TCI, etc

GEO Web Portal

Drought
Mapping and
Monitoring

Integration
Input
Biophysical
characteristi
cs

Neural Network
Training
Neural Network
Forecasting
Time Series
Weather
Data

Global Agricultural
Drought Monitoring
and Forecasting Web
Portal

Input
Output

Drought
Prediction

Web Browser

Climate
Data

Register

Integration

Input

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System Implementation Approach

Service Oriented Architecture

AJAX Enabled Web Application

OGC Standards (WCS, WFS, WMS, GML, CSW, WPS)

adopted

Interoperable data services and processing services

Implemented within GEOSS Common Infrastructure

Contributed to GEOSS with open data access

Multi-phase implementation

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Phase-I Implementation (I)

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Phase-I Implementation (II)

Remote sensing based drought monitoring
30-year calibrated NDVI time series derived from AVHRR and
MODIS are used to establish the baseline and dynamics of
vegetation conditions for each co-registered pixel.
Multiple NDVI-based agricultural drought indices, such as VCI,
are computed for the baseline and dynamics for drought
monitoring.
An Ajax-enabled Web portal is provided to visualize, analysis
and download global-scale drought information at fine spatial
and temporal resolution.

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Capability

Fine resolution at global level

250m~1km spatial and up to1-day temporal resolution

Online and on-demand visualization, analysis and downloading the

agriculture drought data and information

open and interoperable drought related data services and processing

services

Multiple common drought indices (NDVI, VCI, TCI, etc.) downloadable with
customization

Defined any interest area by polygon or administrative districts at global level

Increased flexibility of drought indices related application

User-defined agriculture drought
Timely and ready-to-use agriculture drought data and information

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Demonstration (I)

Global NDVI Map for the 8-day period of 05/16/2000-05/23/2000. Source:

http://gis.csiss.gmu.edu/GADMFS

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Demonstration (II)

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Demonstration (III)

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Validation (I)

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Validation (II)

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Conclusions
Phase I implementation shows that open and
interoperable drought related data services and
processing services from the system can significantly
increase the accessibility of remote sensing based
agriculture drought information to the world-wide users.
Such a system will also increase the flexibility of
drought indices related applications and researches in
the GEOSS community.

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