Imzahim A. Alwan; Abdul Razzak T. Ziboon; Alaa G. Khalaf
Abstract
This study was conducted to monitor the agricultural drought inthe Middle Euphrates area, Iraq during the period from 1988 to 2018.Multispectral Landsat TM, ETM+, and OLI images were ...
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This study was conducted to monitor the agricultural drought inthe Middle Euphrates area, Iraq during the period from 1988 to 2018.Multispectral Landsat TM, ETM+, and OLI images were used. The imagesdated 1988, 1993, 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2018, which obtained duringgrowth months of plants (January, February, March, November, andDecember).A computerized drought monitoring was adopted using ERDASImagine 2015, ENVI 3.2, and ArcGIS 10.5 environments to process andanalysis the data. The spectral indices, which used in this study were: TheNormalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Vegetation ConditionIndex (VCI). The change analysis presented in this study is based on thestatistics extracted from the six resultant drought maps. The final resultswere illustrated that drought area in the region had a noticeable increasecompared with no drought area. The results revealed that percentage of nodrought area ranged between (7%) and (17%) during the period from 1988to 2018. The extremely and severely drought classes recorded highpercentage followed by moderately and mild drought in the region. Fromthis study can be concluded that there is a high rate of drought in theregion, especially in its southern and western parts.