APPLICATION OF REMOTE SENSING IN DROUGHT MONITORING: THE CASE OF THYOLO, MALAWI.

Remote sensing stands to be the most vibrant method that provides real time and large area data. It is more advantageous in drought monitoring than traditional methods. In instances, meteorological observations become unreliable in particular regions where scarcity of weather monitoring tools is problem. The study involved the extraction of advanced drought indicators from remotely sensed data to assess the drought occurrence in Thyolo. Such indicators include, Land Surface Temperature (LST), Normalised Difference Vegetation index (NDVI) and Vegetation Water Supply Index (VWSI). The study shows that many locations in the district experienced high temperatures for a prolonged period. There was also poor vegetation which predominated during the 2015/16 growing season. Most importantly, the study finds that the district was hit by drought during that season. The north, northeast, east and southeast locations were mostly hit by extreme drought. Such areas were the ones which were mostly hit by high temperatures for a prolonged period which led to vegetation failure. Furthermore, the study indicates that 40 %, 35 %, 10 % and 5 % of the areas were affected by severe, extreme, moderate and slight droughts respectively. Only 10 % of the area had normal conditions for health vegetation growth. Such being the case, I recommend the GoM to develop drought monitoring systems so that future drought cases are detected and initiatives must be put in place to minimize their likely adverse impacts to communities in the country as a whole.