Drought Monitoring Method based on Multiscale Remote Sensing Data Fusion

Drought is one of the agricultural natural disasters, which seriously threatens the natural ecological environment and world's food security. The FY-3B satellite has the ability of drought monitoring, but its spatial resolution is low, which isn't suitable for small and medium scale drought monitoring. In view of this, this paper calculates the High resolution Soil Moisture Drought Index (HSMDI) in the study area through the effective fusion of MODIS optical data which is small and medium scale and FY-3B soil moisture data of large scale. The results were verified by the measured meteorological data and simulated soil moisture data, which showed that HSMDI had a good consistency with precipitation and soil moisture (P < 0.05). The spatial and temporal characteristics of drought described by HSMDI were consistent with the actual drought situation in the study area, indicating that the method can effectively achieve small and medium scale drought monitoring.