Monitoring of Agricultural Drought in the Middle Euphrates Area, IraqUsing Landsat Dataset

Abstract

This study was conducted to monitor the agricultural drought in the Middle Euphrates area, Iraq during the period from 1988 to 2018. Multispectral Landsat TM, ETM+, and OLI images were used. The images Index (VCI). The change analysis presented in this study is based on the statistics extracted from the six resultant drought maps. The final results were illustrated that drought area in the region had a noticeable increase compared with no drought area. The results revealed that percentage of no-drought area ranged between (7%) and (17%) during the period from 1988 to 2018. The extremely and severely drought classes recorded high percentage followed by moderately and mild drought in the region. From this study can be concluded that there is a high rate of drought in the region, especially in its southern and western parts.