Agricultural Drought Monitoring Using Web-Serviced Remote Sensing Data

Purpose of this paper is to propose a simple method for agricultural drought monitoring using web-serviced remote sensing data. First, we propose a soil Field Capacity (FC) derivation method base on Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) daily Soil Moisture (SM) product, and the China FC map in 2007 is produced, then the trational drought monitoring index, Relative Soil Moisture (RSM), is calculated by SM divided FC. Results indicate that the AMSR-E derived FC is obviously less than the field measured FC, and the RSM is not in good agreement with the field measured RSM. We cannot determine the reliability of AMSR-E derived FC and RSM by the limitation of the validated data, but the relative error indicate that this result is acceptable compared to the field measured error. we conclude that AMSR-E derived RSM is potentially a real-time, simple and continual index for agricultural drought monitoring in large scale area.