Assessment of drought manifestation on soils of agricultural lands of the Belarusian Lakeland using temperature-moisture and vegetation indices based on remote sensing data

The article studies the possibilities of determining soil moisture in the territory of the Belarusian Lakeland on the basis of microwave and multispectral optical Earth sensing. The method of soil moisture determination is proposed, based on supplementing the results of microwave Earth sensing with estimates of daily variations of the land surface temperature measured by satellite radiometers in the atmospheric transparency window of 10–12 µm, and obtaining the calibration equation based on the ERA5-Land reanalysis. The proposed method has been implemented for the Belarusian Lakeland on the basis of the Google Earth Engine cloud computing platform. It is shown that comparison of current estimates of soil moisture, vegetation index and land surface temperature with their minimum and maximum values for a given time of the year allows estimating the intensity of drought, its spatial distribution and impact on the state of crops. Multiyear changes in the vegetation health index (VHI), calculated from normalised values of vegetation index NDVI and land surface temperature, were analysed for different months of the growing season. It is shown that earlier onset of the growing season improves the condition of agricultural plants in May, but in the following months the vegetation conditions deteriorate. In June in the whole territory of Vitebsk region, and in July and August in the western part of the region, the risks of temperature and water stress in plants increase due to more frequent formation of powerful blocking anticyclones. The geospatial peculiarities of climate change impact on agricultural plants revealed in this paper should be taken into account for more effective use of the new agroclimatic potential of the Belarusian Lakeland.

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