Drought Monitoring with Drones: A Hundred Fields at a Time

Drought frequency and severity are likely to increase due to global warming. Droughts
already have a substantial negative influence on agriculture and the economy and finding ways to reduce their effects could have a monumental impact. Although NASA already has satellites deployed to collect drought data, these satellites are more for global drought indexing than local.

To alleviate droughts on a local level, this paper proposes the use of drones to map soil moisture, plant health, and other drought indicators. The proposed drone design is a fixed-wing UAV equipped with a hyperspectral camera, a LiDAR sensor, and an array of weather sensors. These tools will permit it to reliably capture the necessary data to enhance suggestions on improving drought management practices.

The collected data from the drones will be deployable in many ways, including for
agricultural and non-agricultural applications. The hyperspectral camera has applications in monitoring the health of crops within a field to direct relief measures to the crops most in need. Thermal and LiDAR imaging can be deployed for locating leaks, predicting shortages of water bodies, and determining a field’s water needs.

To implement a drought-monitoring drone, the recommended steps include building a
prototype drone design that is equipped with the outlined instruments. The prototype drone could then be deployed to collect training data to guide a neural network that would provide interpretations and predictions from the data for users. After the prototype design is iterated upon, it will be ready for deployment and inform water management methods to serve the world in our battle against drought.