Monitoring of agricultural drought in the middle Euphrates Area, Iraq using Landsat dataset

Abstract EN

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 dated 1988, 1993, 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2018, which obtained during growth months of plants (January, February, March, November, and December).A computerized drought monitoring was adopted using ERDAS Imagine 2015, ENVI 3.2, and ArcGIS 10.5 environments to process and analysis the data.

The spectral indices, which used in this study were: The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Vegetation Condition 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 nodrought 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.