Indicator-to-impact links to help improve agricultural drought preparedness in Thailand

Abstract

Abstract. Droughts in Thailand are becoming more severe due to climate change. Developing a reliable drought monitoring and early warning system (DMEWS) is essential to strengthen a country's resilience to droughts. However, for a DMEWS to be valuable, the drought indicators provided to stakeholders must have relevance to tangible impacts on the ground. Here, we analyse drought indicator-to-impact relationships in Thailand, using a combination of correlation analysis and machine learning techniques (random forest). In the correlation analysis, we study the link between meteorological drought indicators and high-resolution remote sensing vegetation indices used as proxies for crop yield and forest growth impacts. Our analysis shows that this link varies depending on land use, season and region. The random forest models built to estimate regional crop productivity allow a more in-depth analysis of the crop- and region-specific importance of different drought indicators. The results highlight seasonal patterns of drought vulnerability for individual crops, usually linked to their growing season, although the effects are somewhat attenuated in irrigated regions. Integration of the approaches provides new, detailed knowledge of crop- and region-specific indicator-to-impact links, which can form the basis of targeted mitigation actions in an improved DMEWS in Thailand and could be applied to other parts of Southeast Asia and beyond.

Exploring drought hazard, vulnerability, and related impacts to agriculture in Brandenburg

“…The Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index (SPEI) captures both precipitation and potential evaporation and has evolved as one of the most commonly used meteorological drought indicators in recent years (Vicente-Serrano et al 2010, Rossi et al 2023, Tanguy et al 2023. Monthly values of SPEI-1 (one-month accumulation SPEI) were provided by Zhang et al (2024) on 10 km grid resolution from 2013 to 2022.…”

Impact assessment of agricultural droughts on water use efficiency in different climatic regions of Punjab Province Pakistan using MODIS time series imagery

“…DEM was used to determine the topography and slope of the research area. Also evaluated the statistical analysis to identify the significance of spatial and temporal patterns observed in maps and created hotspot and cluster analysis through the GIS tool to show the high level of drought and WUE in different climate regions(Hoover et al, 2023;Tanguy et al, 2023).T A B L E 4 Climate zoning based on the De Martonne index. Drought map of Punjab based on SVI 2001-2022.R…”