Assessment of agricultural drought in Morocco based on a composite of the Vegetation Health Index (VHI) and Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI)

Abstract

According to IPCC, Morocco is a highly vulnerable country to extreme climate events, especially droughts; this will affect different socioeconomic sectors, mainly the agriculture sector. Droughts are controlled by the variability of precipitation and evapotranspiration but also not neglecting the effect of land surface conditions such as land surface temperature. In this present study, the remote sense observations MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and CMSAF Land Surface Temperature (LST) were used for calculating the Vegetation Health Index (VHI). The main advantage of remote sensing products is that they are reasonably efficient in terms of temporal and spatial coverage, and they are useful for the monitoring and assessment of drought in the near real-time. Furthermore, ERA5 Reanalysis-based SPEI is calculated. The goal of this study is to assess the spatial and temporal patterns of drought, this study offers the composite of SPEI and VHI drought monitoring obtained by plotting maps and graphs to show the monthly and annual variability of drought for the period 2000–2015 over the whole of Morocco. This monitoring can be used as a near real-time warning system in a changing climate.