Multi-scale EO-based agricultural drought monitoring indicator for operative irrigation networks management in Italy

Study region: Two irrigation Consortia in Italy: the Chiese in Lombardia Region and the Capitanata in Puglia Region. Study focus: Drought monitoring is crucial especially where the rainfall regime is irregular and agriculture is mainly based on irrigated crops, such as in Mediterranean countries. In this work, the main objective is to develop an EO-based agricultural drought monitoring indicator (ADMIN) for operative irrigation networks management. The ADMIN indicator considers different levels of drought conditions combining anomalies of rainfall, soil moisture, land surface temperature and vegetation indices. Multiple remote sensing data, which differ on sensing techniques, spatial and temporal resolutions and spectral bands, are used and the uncertainty in anomalies computation derived from the use of multiple sources of remote sensing datasets is also discussed. The analyses are performed for the two Irrigation Consortia, which differ for climate, irrigation volumes and techniques, and crop types. New hydrological insights for the region: The obtained results show an inverse dependency between the cumulated ADMIN and the irrigation volumes in the Capitanata area (which has on-demand irrigation), whereas the dependency is much weaker in the Chiese Consortium (where irrigation is provided on a fixed basis, independently from the drought conditions). In both areas, the role of irrigation is critical to sustain production and preserve crop yields, which seem almost uncorrelated to ADMIN. ADMIN has demonstrated to outperform the use of single anomalies.