Assessment of drought with a real-time web-based application for drought management in humid tropical Kerala, India

Geospatial techniques are useful for near real-time monitoring of drought and towards devising local-level effective drought management plan. Based on the historic and current remote sensing data, one can identify the influence of drought on the vegetation status by analyzing the anomaly/drought condition of a particular area of interest (AOI) through different digital image processing techniques. In this study, an attempt has been made to develop a web-based application for generating drought maps and district-wise drought information at real time in the web server using Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) and Python scripts. A web-based application was developed and drought conditions existing in the study area were understood both spatially and temporally. The results of the application showed distinct variation of drought prevalence within the administrative boundaries. This web-based application was validated with drought analysis carried out using different drought indices, viz., standard precipitation index and reconnaissance drought index. The results established that this validated approach could be used for developing disaster management plan well in advance to combat the consequences of drought across the globe and to evolve strategic decisions which will have implications in the various sectors of the economy.