Mapping drought status of winter wheat from MODIS data in North China Plain

Drought is very severe in North China Plain, where winter wheat is one of the most important cropping systems. In this paper, we present an approach to map drought status of winter wheat in the plain for better farming management. The approach is based on the temperature-vegetation dryness index (TVDI) computed from the wet and dry edges of Ts-NDVI space. Using the MODIS data, we applied the approach to map drought status in North China Plain for the winter wheat growing period from March to May in 2006. Our results show that spatial variation of agricultural drought is very obvious in the region. Severe drought was observed in eastern Hebei, western Shandong, and northwestern Henan province respectively. The weather reports from China Meteorological Administration were used to validate our mapping results of the drought status. The highly accordance of our drought mapping results with the reported drought distribution from CMA confirms the applicability of TVDI approach in drought mapping in North China Plain.