Agricultural Drought Watch

Drought is not visible as an absolute value, a field can look green and still be in trouble. What matters is the comparison against what that same field normally looks like at that point in the season. This service builds that baseline from the multi-year satellite archive and reports each field’s current condition as a position within its own historical range.

It computes the established condition indices: the Vegetation Condition Index for greenness relative to historical extremes, the Thermal Condition Index for canopy temperature stress, and the combined Vegetation Health Index, alongside water-content indices from the short-wave infrared. It then classifies each parcel into a drought stage following the cascade logic Europe’s Drought Observatory uses — precipitation shortfall, then soil moisture deficit, then visible vegetation stress — so that a user is warned before the damage shows.

The difference from what already exists publicly is resolution. Europe’s operational combined indicator runs at roughly 5 kilometres, which is a region. Sentinel-2 gives 10 to 20 metres, which is a field — and a field is the unit at which a farmer, an insurer or a paying agency makes a decision.