Evaluation of Reservoir Monitoring-based Hydrological Drought Index Using Sentinel-1 SAR Waterbody Detection Technique

Water storage is one of the factors that most directly represent the amount of available water resources. Since the effects of drought can be more intuitively expressed, it is also used in various studies for drought evaluation. In a recent study, hydrological drought was evaluated through information on observing reservoirs with optical images. The short observation cycle and diversity of optical satellites provide a lot of data. However, there are some limitations because it is vulnerable to the influence of weather or the atmospheric environment. Therefore, this study attempted to conduct a study on estimating the drought index using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image with relatively little influence from the observation environment. We produced the waterbody of Baekgok and Chopyeong reservoirs using SAR images of Sentinel-1 satellites and calculated the Reservoir Area Drought Index (RADI), a hydrological drought index. In order to validate the applicability of RADI to drought monitoring, it was compared with Reservoir Storage Drought Index (RSDI) based on measured storage. The two indices showed a very high correlation with the correlation coefficient, r=0.87, Area Under curve, AUC=0.97. These results show the possibility of regional-scale hydrological drought monitoring of SAR-based RADI. As the number of available SAR images increases in the future, it is expected that the utilization of drought monitoring will also increase.