Drought Monitoring Using Tiangong-2 Wide-Band Spectrometer Data

Drought monitoring is an important research direction for the remote sensing application. In this paper, the red and near infrared data acquired by the Tiangong-2 Space Laboratory on 28th June in 2017 were used to monitor drought in the south of America. To calibrate the drought monitoring inversion model, the in situ soil moisture data about 15 observation sites from 21th June to 28th June collected by the Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) were analyzed. In addition, the hysteresis effect between PDI and the soil moisture were discussed. The result shows: the band8 and band11 of the Wide-band Imaging Spectrometer (WIS) aboard Tiangong-2 is more sensitive to the soil moisture at 50 cm depth, and the PDI has a hysteresis effect on the drought response about 1–2 days. The red and near infrared data from the Tiangong-2 is a valid data source for the drought monitoring and will play an important role in drought monitoring.