Multi-Satellite Remote Sensing for Drought Monitoring and Impact Assessment
A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Remote Sensing".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 August 2026 | Viewed by 291
Editors
Interests: evapotranspiration; vegetation response; remote sensing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: drought monitoring; drought propagation; evapotranspiration
Interests: climate change; climate change and human health; climatic and hydrological extremes; urban climate; extreme events prediction and projection
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Drought development is fundamentally driven by persistent imbalances in land–atmosphere water–energy interactions. Enhanced atmospheric water demand, typically reflected by increasing vapor pressure deficit, accelerates soil moisture depletion through evapotranspiration, leading to feedback involving reduced latent heat flux, increased surface temperature, and intensified atmospheric dryness. These coupled processes propagate drought signals across the atmosphere–soil–vegetation continuum, inducing vegetation physiological stress and amplifying ecosystem impacts. However, many commonly used drought indicators focus on individual components of the land surface system, making it challenging to comprehensively represent surface heterogeneity, drought propagation, and delayed vegetation responses.
Recent advances in satellite remote sensing provide unprecedented opportunities to monitor drought evolution and impacts using multi-source observations, including precipitation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), and vegetation optical depth (VOD). Combined with emerging artificial intelligence and deep learning techniques for nonlinear pattern discovery and multi-source data integration, these developments enable more comprehensive characterization of drought processes.
This Special Issue aims to bring together recent studies that leverage multi-source remote sensing and advanced algorithms to achieve improved monitoring of drought evolution and multi-dimensional impact assessment across agricultural, hydrological, and ecological systems.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Integrated multi-source remote sensing drought indices and monitoring;
- Drought evolution, propagation, and response time lags across the atmosphere–soil–vegetation continuum;
- Artificial intelligence and hybrid physical–AI approaches for drought monitoring and prediction;
- Remote sensing-based assessment of drought impacts on vegetation productivity, agriculture, and ecosystem functioning;
- Monitoring and driving mechanisms of flash droughts using high-resolution satellite observations;
- Compound drought-related extreme events and long-term drought variability under climate change.
Dr. Dongdong Kong
Dr. Mingzhong Xiao
Prof. Dr. Xihui Gu
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- drought monitoring
- drought propagation
- multi-source remote sensing
- vegetation response
- soil moisture
- evapotranspiration
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