Monitoring Drought Using Coarse Resolution Polar-Orbiting Satellite Data

There are two distinct categories of remotely sensed data: satellite data and aerial data or photographs. Unlike aerial photographs, satellite data have been routinely available for most of the earth’s land areas for more than two decades and therefore are preferred for reliably monitoring global vegetation conditions. Satellite data are the result of reflectance, emission, and/or back scattering of electromagnetic energy from earth objects (e.g., vegetation, soil, and water). The electromagnetic spectrum is very broad, and only a limited range of wavelengths is suitable for earth resource monitoring and applications. The gaseous composition (O2, O3, CO2, H2O, etc.) of the atmosphere, along with particulates and aerosols, cause significant absorption and scattering of electromagnetic energy over some regions of the spectrum. This restricts remote sensing of the earth’s surface to certain “atmospheric windows,” or regions in which electromagnetic energy can pass through the atmosphere with minimal interference. Some such windows include visible, infrared, shortwave, thermal, and microwave ranges of the spectrum. The shortwave-infrared (SWIR) wavelengths are sensitive to moisture content of vegetation, whereas the thermal-infrared region is useful for monitoring and detecting plant canopy stress and for modeling latent and sensible heat fluxes. Thermal remote sensing imagery is acquired both during the day and night, and it measures the emitted energy from the surface, which is related to surface temperatures and the emissivity of surface materials. This chapter focuses on the contribution of visible and infrared wavelengths to global drought monitoring, and chapter 6 discusses visible, infrared, and thermal wave contributions. Under microwave windows, the satellite data can be divided into two categories: active microwave and passive microwave. Chapters 7 and 8 describe applications of passive and active microwave remote sensing to drought monitoring, respectively. Early use of satellite data was pioneered by the Landsat series originally known as the Earth Resource Technology Satellite (ERTS; http://landsat7. usgs.gov/index.php). Landsat was the first satellite specifically designed for broad-scale observation of the earth’s land surface.