Optical and thermal remote sensing for monitoring agricultural drought

Abstract

By effectively observing the land surface and obtaining farmland conditions, satellite remote sensing has played an essential role in agricultural drought monitoring over past decades. Among all remote sensing techniques, optical and thermal remote sensing have the most extended history of being utilized in drought monitoring. The primary goal of this paper is to illustrate how optical and thermal remote sensing have been and will be applied in the monitoring, assessment, and prediction of agricultural drought. We group the methods into four categories: optical, thermal, optical and thermal, and multi-source. For each category, a concise explanation is given to show the inherent mechanisms. We pay special attention to solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, which has great potential in early drought detection. Finally, we look at the future directions of agricultural drought monitoring, including (1) early detection; (2) spatio-temporal resolution; (3) organic combination of multi-source data; and (4) smart prediction and assessment based on deep learning and cloud computing.