Drought Monitoring and Analyzing by Remote Sensing Based on MODIS Data in Heilongjiang Province of 2009

Heilongjiang is China’s first major grain-producing province, which is typical in dry farming. Drought is one of the major natural disasters in the agricultural production area. Soil moisture is an important index of drought monitoring. Remote sensing has advantages such as a wide range of observation, high instantaneity and low cost, which can be widely applied to soil moisture monitoring. In this paper, we analyze the relationship among soil moisture and NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and LST (Land Surface Temperature), and built remote sensing estimating model of soil moisture based on NDVI and LST. According to this model, we dynamically monitored the drought in Heilongjiang province from April to June in 2009 based on NDVI and LST product of MODIS data and the ground measured soil moisture. The monitoring results show that the drought in Heilongjiang Province gradually relieved at first stage, then worsened significantly and eventually reached the mitigation, and the development of drought exhibits good agreement with the practical situation. The research indicates that the soil moisture monitoring method based on satellite remote sensing and the ground measured soil moisture can be applied to large-scale drought monitoring in Heilongjiang province.