title: Droughts in India from 1981 to 2013 and Implications to Wheat Production.
abstract: Understanding drought from multiple perspectives is critical due to its complex interactions with crop production, especially in India. However, most studies only provide singular view of drought and lack the integration with specific crop phenology. In this study, four time series of monthly meteorological, hydrological, soil moisture, and vegetation droughts from 1981 to 2013 were reconstructed for the first time. The wheat growth season (from October to April) was particularly analyzed. In this study, not only the most severe and widespread droughts were identified, but their spatial-temporal distributions were also analyzed alone and concurrently. The relationship and evolutionary process among these four types of droughts were also quantified. The role that the Green Revolution played in drought evolution was also studied. Additionally, the trends of drought duration, frequency, extent, and severity were obtained. Finally, the relationship between crop yield anomalies and all four kinds of drought during the wheat growing season was established. These results provide the knowledge of the most influential drought type, conjunction, spatial-temporal distributions and variations for wheat production in India. This study demonstrates a novel approach to study drought from multiple views and integrate it with crop growth, thus providing valuable guidance for local drought mitigation.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS), Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China.|Department of Agronomy-Crops, Soil, Environmental Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA.
authors.forename: Xiang
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA.
authors.forename: Renee
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Obringer
authors.affiliation: Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA.
authors.forename: Chehan
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS), Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China.|Collaborative Innovation Center of Geospatial Technology, Wuhan 430079, China.
authors.forename: Nengcheng
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Department of Agronomy-Crops, Soil, Environmental Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA.|Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA.
authors.forename: Dev
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Niyogi
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture; D055864:Droughts; D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D058998:Remote Sensing Technology / Q000639:trends; D012621:Seasons; D012987:Soil / Q000737:chemistry; D014908:Triticum / Q000254:growth & development*
chemical_list: D012987:Soil