Development of multivariate integrated drought monitoring index (MIDMI) for Warangal region of Telangana, India

Agricultural drought is one of the most frequent natural disasters in India’s southern part. Remote sensing-based drought indices give advantages in terms of continuous monitoring of land surface. The crop production in the Warangal region in India’s southern part is adversely affected due to insufficient rainfall and poor irrigation management. This study aims to develop a multivariate remote sensing-based composite drought index (CDI) to monitor the agricultural drought. Landsat-8 satellite data for all the 11 subregions of Warangal urban and 15 subregions of the rural district of Telangana from 2013 to 2020 for the month of May is used to obtain drought indices. The drought indices are used in this study to develop MIDMI and are compared according to the percentage area of the Warangal region under five different drought categories. In this study, the MIDMI is computed by a weighted average of five vegetation drought indices for the Warangal region as per the method developed by Iyengar and Sudarshan for the multivariate data. MIDMI for all the 26 subregions of the Warangal rural and Warangal urban districts is between 0.4 and 0.6, which makes the Warangal region moderately vulnerable to agricultural drought.