The role of multi-sensor remote sensing for drought characterization: challenges and opportunities

Satellite based remote sensing plays important role in studying regional to continental scale drought. One of the unique elements of remote sensing platforms is their multi-sensor capabilities, which enhance the capacity for characterizing drought from a variety of aspects. However, multi-sensor integrated drought evaluation is in its infancy. To advocate and encourage on-going exploration and integration of multi-sensor remote sensing for drought studies, we provide an overview of the role of multi-sensor remote sensing for addressing knowledge gaps and driving advances in drought studies. We first present a comprehensive summary of large-scale drought-related remote sensing datasets that can be used for multi-sensor drought studies. Then we provide a detailed review of how the integrated multi-sensor remote sensing could enhance our analysis in multiple important drought related phenomena and mechanisms such as drought-induced tree mortality, drought-related ecosystem fires, post-drought recovery and legacy effects, flash drought, and drought trends under climate change. We also provide a summary of recent modeling advances towards developing integrated multi-sensor remote sensing drought indices. We highlight that leveraging multi-sensor remote sensing provides unique benefits for regional to global drought studies, particularly in: 1) revealing the complex drought impact mechanisms on various ecosystem components; 2) providing continuous long-term drought related information at large scales; 3) presenting real-time drought information with high spatiotemporal resolution; 4) providing multiple lines of evidence of drought monitoring to improve modeling and prediction robustness; and 5) improving the accuracy of drought monitoring and assessment efforts.