Comparative assessment of drought monitoring index susceptibility using geospatial techniques

There are two main categories of dryness monitoring indices based on spectral feature space. One category uses the vertical distance from any point to a line passing through the coordinate origin, which is perpendicular to a soil line, to monitor the dryness conditions. The most popular indices are the Perpendicular Dryness Index (PDI) and the modified perpendicular dryness index (MPDI). The other category uses the distance from any point in feature space to the coordinate origin to represent the dryness status, for instance, the soil moisture (SM) monitoring index (SMMI) and the modified soil moisture monitoring index (MSMMI). In this study, the performances and differences of these four indicators were evaluated using field-measured SM (FSM) data based on Gaofen-1 (GF-1) wide field of view (WFV), Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), and Sentinel-2 Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) sensors. Performance evaluations were conducted in two study areas, namely an arid and semi-arid region of northwest China and a humid agricultural region of southwest Canada. We employed gradient-based structural similarity (GSSIM) to quantitatively assess the similarity of the structural information and structural characteristics among these four indicators. Monitoring SM in bare soil or low vegetation-covered areas in the semi-arid region, the SMMI, PDI, MSMMI, and MPDI from Near-Infrared (NIR)-Red had significantly negative linear correlations with the FSM at 0–5-cm depth (P < 0.01). However, SMMI was better than PDI in estimating SM in bare soil, which was better than MSMMI and MPDI for GF-1. Moreover, the PDI and SMMI had similar SM evaluation abilities, which were better than those of MPDI and MSMMI for Landsat-8. The GSSIM map of the SMMI/PDI and the MSMMI/MPDI showed that the low change areas accounted for 99.89% and 98.89% for GF-1, respectively, and 95.78% and 94.45% for Landsat-8, respectively. This result indicated that the SMMI, PDI, MSMMI, and MPDI values from NIR-Red in low vegetation cover were similar. In monitoring SM in agricultural vegetation areas, the accuracy of the four indices from Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) feature space was higher than that from NIR-Red feature space for Sentinel-2. The SM monitoring effect of MSMMI and MPDI was better than that of SMMI and PDI. Due to the lack of SWIR band, GF-1 was limited in monitoring SM in vegetation-covered areas. The SMMI and MSMMI, which do not rely on the soil line, were more suitable than PDI and MPDI for retrieving SM in the complex surface environment depending on the soil line and the number of parameters. GF-1 with 16-m resolution had higher accuracy in SM assessment than Landsat-8 with 30-m resolution and had almost the same accuracy as Sentinel-2 with 20 m.