A Novel Method for Agricultural Drought Risk Assessment

Abstract

Climate change, increased temperatures and imbalanced precipitation distributions will potentially increase the local drought risk in certain areas. Drought assessment can identify the hidden dangers of drought and provide a theoretical basis for disaster prevention and mitigation. In this paper, a new agricultural drought risk assessment method proposed from the perspective of grain yield. The first principal components of precipitation, temperature, humidity and soil moisture represent hazard factors. The sensitive yield, which represents the sensitivity, was separated from the grain yield using a regression method. Additionally, the trend component of the grain yield represents the adaptive capacity, and the crop planting area represents exposure. Based on these definitions, the concepts of unit drought risk and regional drought risk are proposed. Four cities in Heilongjiang Province, which has the highest grain yield of any province in China, were used as application examples, and the spatial and temporal variation in the agricultural drought risk were analyzed. Application example show that the method for evaluating agricultural drought presented in this paper is reasonable in a statistical sense. The process for calculating sensitivity and adaptability shows that this method is suitable for arid and semi-arid areas, where grain yield is sensitive to hazard factors, and areas where grain yield has a certain trend.

Reviewing the Potential of Sentinel-2 in Assessing the Drought

“…Drought is a phenomenon that occurs in an area, due to extreme climate or lack of water. They are among the most harmful and expensive natural disasters in the world [178][179][180][181]. Droughts are becoming more common around the world in varying frequencies and intensities and are affecting developed and underdeveloped countries [181,182].…”

Agricultural drought risk assessment of Northern New South Wales, Australia using geospatial techniques

“…In recent decades, drought frequencies and intensities are higher in many parts of the world (Wang et al 2019;Mohsenipour et al 2018), such as Australia. This increasing trend of droughts with its severe consequences will continue in the future due to the adverse impact of climate change and rising of water demand (Jiao et al 2019;Rahman and Lateh 2016;Pei et al 2019).…”

“…Here drought risk mapping can be a useful tool for managing drought. Drought risk mapping provides this supporting spatial information analyzing the causes and variable of droughts and integrating all the spatial variables in the mapping of hazard, vulnerability, mitigation capacity and risk for identifying their spatial pattern of droughts (Hao et al 2012;Pei et al 2019;Zhang et al 2020;Dikshit et al 2020a). Generally, the risk is the result of the interaction between hazard, vulnerability and exposure as well as mitigation capacity (Hoque et al 2018;Shahid and Behrawan 2008;Gu et al 2017).…”

“…Mitigation capacity refers to existing mitigation measures that are taken to reduce the drought impacts (Khan 2008). The risk maps can assist decision making departments to formulate effective drought mitigation strategies to minimize the adverse impacts of droughts (Pei et al 2019;Belal et al 2014;Wijitkosum and Sriburi 2019).…”

“…Spatial analysis coupled with remote sensing are potentially useful techniques to support all of these procedures (Palchaudhuri and Biswas 2016;Zeng et al 2019). Several drought risk mapping approaches are documented in the published literature (Zeng et al 2019;Hao et al 2012;Wijitkosum and Sriburi 2019;Pei et al 2019;Guo et al 2016). Since drought is a complex phenomenon and several criteria influence different types of drought events, multi-criteria based mapping approaches are considered highly useful to generate detailed drought risk information (Ajaz et al 2019).…”