Drought has been a frequently happened type of disaster in China, and it has caused massive losses to people's lives.
Especially the drought happened in Shandong province in the late 2010, which was recognized as the severest in the past
five hundred years in some areas. Evaluation must be done in order to make proper rescue plans. Instead of collecting
data site by site, remote sensing is an efficient way to acquire data in a large area, which is very helpful for drought
identification. Some normal ways in remote sensing for drought analysis are explained and compared in this paper, and
then the VSWI method is chosen to evaluation the drought in Shandong province. Because of its free data policy and
wide availability, the data sets acquired by Terra-MODIS are chosen to identify the drought severity in Shandong
province. From the drought severity level images we can see that almost the whole area of Shandong province was lack
of water except the Weishan Lake and eastern coastline regions where large area of water exists. The southwest region,
including Heze and Jining, is in moderate drought condition, where it is used to be an important grain-producing area.
This drought condition will inevitably put a negative effect on its grain production. The central and southern areas were
in severe drought condition, but fortunately these areas are of hills and mountains, so the drought will only affect the
lives of residents. The northern parts, including Dezhou and Bingzhou areas, were also in severe drought condition, and
these regions are also important for grain-producing, so the severe drought disaster will lead to a sharp grain output cut.
This analysis results will not only shed light on the rescue process, but also give the government some clues on how to
maintain the grain supply safety.
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