Multi-sensor remote sensing for drought characterization

Abstract:

Satellite based remote sensing offers one of the only means to monitor the spatial and temporal development of regional to continental scale droughts. One of the unique features of such platforms is their multi-sensor capability, which enhances the capacity for characterizing drought from a variety of aspects, including not just identifying both vegetation and hydrological responses, but also directly assessing sectoral impacts (e.g., agriculture). With advances in remote sensing capacity and the increasing range of platforms currently available for analysis, this article presents a comprehensive review of drought studies through the lens of multi-sensor remote sensing. We focus on the benefits of multi-sensor remote sensing in drought study topics (e.g., mechanisms of vegetation response to drought, drought-induced tree mortality, drought related ecosystem fires, post-drought recovery and drought legacy effects, flash drought, drought trends under global warming, land-atmospheric feedbacks during droughts), identify drought related remote sensing datasets, and synthesize recent advances for multi-sensor drought monitoring and assessments. We provide a timely review of how integrated multi-sensor remote sensing could enhance drought analysis, and also highlight the need for further progressing and advancing multi-sensor remote sensing drought studies in the future.