• Journal of Environmental Science International
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• v.25 no.12
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• pp.1653-1660
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• 2016

Drought is a reoccurring worldwide natural hazard that affects not only food production but also economics, health, and infrastructure. Drought monitoring is usually performed with precipitation-based indices without consideration of the actual state and amount of the land surface properties. A drought index based on the actual evapotranspiration can overcome these shortcomings. The severity of a drought can be quantified by making a spatial map. The procedure for estimating actual evapotranspiration is costly and complicated, and requires land surface information. The possibility of utilizing drone-driven remotely sensed data for actual evapotranspiration estimation was analyzed in this study. A drone collected data was used to calculate the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI). The spatial resolution was 10 m with a grid of $404{\times}395$. The collected data were applied and parameterized to an actual evapotranspiration estimation. The result shows that drone-based data is useful for estimating actual evapotranspiration and the corresponding drought indices.