On crop rotation in calculating NDVI-based agricultural drought indicators

The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) based agricultural drought indicators have been widely used in agricultural drought monitoring and assessment. However, current methods of calculating those indicators rarely consider effects of crop rotation despite the fact that crop rotation is a very common farming practice over the world. This paper presents both theoretic analysis and experimental tests of the impacts of crop rotation on monitoring agricultural drought with NDVI-based indicators. The results from this study, both qualitative and quantitative, can provide general guidance to and improve accuracy of remote sensing based drought monitoring, predication and analysis over crop-rotated agricultural fields.