《Assessing drought probability for agricultural areas in Africa with coarse resolution》.pdf

RSE-07764; No of Pages 10 Remote Sensing of Environment xxx (2010) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Remote Sensing of Environment journal homepage: www. /locate/rs e Assessing drought probability for agricultural areas in Africa with coarse resolution remote sensing imagery O. Rojas a, A. Vrieling b, F. Rembold a,⁎ a Joint Research Centre, European Commission, TP 266, 21027 Ispra (VA), Italy b University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, P.O. Box 6, 7500 AA Enschede, The Netherlands a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Drought is one of the most frequent climate-related disasters occurring across large portions of the African Received 29 March 2010 continent, often with devastating consequences for the food security of agricultural households. This study Received in revised form 7 September 2010 proposes a novel method for calculating the empirical probability of having a significant proportion of the Accepted 18 September 2010 total agricultural area affected by drought at sub-national level. First, we used the per-pixel Vegetation Health Available online xxxx Index (VHI) from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) averaged over the crop season as main drought indicator. A phenological model based on NDVI was employed for defining the start of season Keywords: Agricultural drought (SOS) and end of the grain filling st