Mapping of Agricultural Drought in Bangladesh using Geographic Information System (GIS)

Bangladesh is an agriculture-dependent country and very often this sector struggles a lot due to various natural hazards including drought and flood. Almost every year in kharif crop season, Bangladesh undergoes through drought which causes a lot of yield loss. So, this has become important to identify the drought-prone areas to reduce the risk of crops yield loss and for policymaking to suggest alternative drought-tolerant crops. The agricultural drought is related to soil properties because of having spatially dynamic in nature. In the present study, agricultural drought has been assessed comprising meteorological drought of kharif season and water holding capacity (WHC) in Geographic Information System (GIS) platform, as GIS is a widely used as a powerful tool to manage and model the spatial data. The metrological drought map has prepared by rainfall data with the calculation of Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using GIS and WHC of soil map has converted from soil texture map. Finally, the agricultural drought map has been derived by overlying metrological drought map and WHC of soil map. The study has found that the north-west and south-west region along with Barisal division of Bangladesh are more prone to agricultural drought area than the other parts. Some districts of the middle part of the country (Dhaka, Manikganj and Faridpur: 492 km2) also suffered in extreme agricultural drought during kharif season.