Vol. 2, Issue 1, Part G (2016)

Abstract
Drought is one of the most widespread and least understood natural phenomena. Drought can be monitored using the climatic variables like rainfall and temperature. In developing countries like India, maintenance and operation of climatic stations is laborious and costly. The application of remote sensing technology for monitoring drought make the process easy and simple. The potential contribution of easily accessible satellite data to the detection and quantification of regional droughts, in the absence of reliable meteorological data, is the objective of this study. In the present study, remote sensing technology is used for monitoring drought for Anantapur district which is second driest region in the country. For this study remote sensing images from the Landsat satellite from 2005 to 2010 were used. The Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalised difference water index (NDWI) which are most widely used vegetation indices in recent years that measure and monitor plant growth and vegetation cover from multi-spectral satellite data are computed for Anantapur region for monitoring drought. The conclusion of this study is NDVI index successfully monitored the drought conditions can be used to assess drought conditions instead meteorological indexes.