Agricultural drought monitoring: Progress, challenges, and prospects

Abstract

In this paper, we compared the concept of agricultural drought and its relationship with other types of droughts and reviewed the progress of research on agricultural drought monitoring indices on the basis of station data and remote sensing. Applicability and limitations of different drought monitoring indices were also compared. Meanwhile, development history and the latest progress in agricultural drought monitoring were evaluated through statistics and document comparison, suggesting a transformation in agricultural drought monitoring from traditional single meteorological monitoring indices to meteorology and remote sensing-integrated monitoring indices. Finally, an analysis of current challenges in agricultural drought monitoring revealed future research prospects for agricultural drought monitoring, such as investigating the mechanism underlying agricultural drought, identifying factors that influence agricultural drought, developing multi-spatiotemporal scales models for agricultural drought monitoring, coupling qualitative and quantitative agricultural drought evaluation models, and improving the application levels of remote sensing data in agricultural drought monitoring.