Drought Conditions in Turkey between 2004 and 2013 via drought indices derived from remotely sensed data

Drought indices are widely used for the assessment of drought severity by indicating relative dryness or wetness affecting environment, society and economies. The possible devastating impacts of drought could only be assessed, monitored and diminished via such quantitative indicators. Hence, several indices are available for the assessment of drought, where several of them are spatial information based. Due to diverse geographical and temporal distribution of drought, spatial information technologies could provide mature approaches, methods and tools. Within this study, spatial information based indices, being Temperature Condition Index (TCI), Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) and Vegetation Health Index (VHI) were generated using Terra-MODIS (moderate resolution imaging spectro-radiometer) images to analyze the drought conditions in Turkey for the period of January 2004–December 2013. In order to automate the process of generating indices and data handling, codes were written in Interactive Data Language programming language. According the results of indices, 2007–2008 and 2013 experienced a serious meteorological drought for the region, where agricultural drought and hydrological drought were also evolving.