By effectively observing the land surface and obtaining farmland conditions, satellite remote sensing has played an essential role in agricultural drought monitoring over past decades. Among all remote sensing techniques, optical and thermal remote sensing have the most extended history of being utilized in drought monitoring. The primary goal of this paper is to illustrate how optical and thermal remote sensing have been and will be applied in the monitoring, assessment, and prediction of agricultural drought. We group the methods into four categories: optical, thermal, optical and thermal, and multi-source. For each category, a concise explanation is given to show the inherent mechanisms. We pay special attention to solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, which has great potential in early drought detection. Finally, we look at the future directions of agricultural drought monitoring, including (1) early detection; (2) spatio-temporal resolution; (3) organic combination of multi-source data; and (4) smart prediction and assessment based on deep learning and cloud computing.

Agricultural drought is a frequent global phenomenon. Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) is a by-product of photosynthesis that can be used to monitor vegetation growth and agricultural drought. The global 0.05° spatial resolution data set has been obtained using the data-driven algorithm method. However, the broken farmland is not conducive to regional agricultural drought monitoring. Hence, 0.05° SIF products should be downscaled. On this basis, a convolutional neural network (CNN) downscaled work was conducted in this article to obtain 0.008° spatial resolution SIF results. The downscaled SIF and land surface temperature (LST) data were used to establish the temperature fluorescence dryness index (TFDI). The new TFDI was subsequently used for monitoring agricultural drought in Henan province (China) during the corn-growing season (from June to October 2013-2017). Results showed that the downscaled SIF data exhibit a good correlation with gross primary productivity (GPP) from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) than 0.05° SIF products. During the study period, the soil moisture fluctuation corresponded well with precipitation, and the value of TFDI had an opposite fluctuation with soil moisture. Meanwhile, the annual averaged TFDI had a high correlation with summer corn yield (R = -0.84). In conclusion, the SIF results through the CNN-based downscaled method were reliable, and the new TFDI was suitable for region agricultural drought monitoring.

Soil moisture (SM) downscaling has been extensively investigated in recent years to improve coarse resolution of SM products. However, available methods for downscaling are generally based on pixel-to-pixel strategy, which ignores the information among pixels. Hence, a new downscaling method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to solve the problem. Furthermore, a weight layer is designed for the input, and residual SM is treated as the output of the CNN to improve the accuracy. This method is applied to downscale Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) SM products (i.e., 36-km L 3 _ SM _ P and 9-km L 3 _ SM _ P _ E ) from January 1, 2018 to December 30, 2018. Compared with 9-km L 3 _ SM _ P _ E , the 9-km downscaling result is satisfactory with obtained correlation coefficient (R), root mean square error (RMSE), and unbiased RMSE (ubRMSE) values of 95.81%, 2.77%, and 2.67%, respectively. Moreover, SMAP SM products (36 and 9 km) and downscaling SM (3 and 1 km) are validated by the in situ data, which are collected by the 109 stations of the Oklahoma Mesonet SM monitoring network. Mean R, RMSE, and ubRMSE values are 67.92%, 7.94%, and 4.87% for 36-km L 3 _ SM _ P ; 67.78%, 8.35%, and 4.95% for 9-km L 3 _ SM _ P _ E ; 67.28%, 8.34%, and 4.97% for 3-km downscaling SM; 65.90%, 8.40%, and 5.18% for 1-km downscaling SM, respectively. The 3-km downscaling SM generated by this method can improve the coarse resolution of 9-km L 3 _ SM _ P _ E while preserving its accuracy. However, error will remarkably increase in the 1-km downscaling SM. Therefore, the proposed method provides a new strategy for SM downscaling and obtains satisfactory results in practice. Additional studies can be conducted in the future.

The occurrence of drought is a complex process and is caused by the interaction of multiple drought-causing factors. The construction of traditional drought models and indexes seldom considers multiple drought-causing factors. This study integrated the precipitation, soil water and heat balance, and crop growth during drought. From the beginning of the process of agricultural drought, the atmosphere, soil, and crops that characterize drought are considered, through the principal component analysis method to construct a comprehensive drought monitoring index (CDMI). This index was verified by using the areas covered by drought, areas affected by drought, relative soil moisture, and crop yield. The annual average CDMI had negative correlations with areas covered and affected by drought. The correlation coefficients were –0.68 and –0.73. Moreover, the CDMI value had positive correlations with relative soil moisture and crop yield. The maximum correlation coefficient between CDMI and relative soil moisture was 0.91, and the correlation coefficient with maize yield was 0.52. Subsequently, the CDMI was applied to long-term drought monitoring in agricultural areas during the summer maize growing season (June to September) in Henan Province. Results showed that the most severe years of agricultural drought in Henan Province were 2000, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2014. The most severe agricultural drought occurred in July and August 2014. Statistics found that Henan Province had high frequencies of severe drought. This study proved that CDMI calculated by multisource remote sensing data is a reliable and effective indicator for monitoring and assessing agricultural drought.

Soil moisture content is an important parameter in hydrological, meteorological, and agricultural applications. Balenzano et al. proposed the alpha approximation method in 2011 for solving some complex issues during the retrieval of soil moisture over agricultural crops with synthetic aperture radar data. However, determining the constraints and solving the underdetermined system of equations in this method add new challenges. Considering the questions of constraints and underdetermined system of equations, the alpha approximation method is used to augment the measured data, and can avoid solving the underdetermined system of equations with constraints directly. Then, these data are applied in a support vector regression machine for soil moisture estimation. It is found that when an optimal model is determined, the method proposed in this article is superior to the direct use of the alpha approximation method, and the root-mean-squared error (RMSE) decreased from 0.0775 to 0.0339 and R^2 increased from 0.0467 to 0.6491. In addition, the method obtained a good result from a data set collected that included a different growing period of crops by changing the standardized method from StandardScaler to Scale, where the RMSE is 0.0501 and R^2 is 0.3204. This indicates the good generalization capability of this method. In conclusion, the proposed method solves the two questions effectively and provides a potential way for long-time or large-scale soil moisture monitoring with much less in situ measurements.

Recycling waste tires through pyrolysis technology generates refractory wastewater, which is harmful to the environment if not disposed properly. In this study, a combined process of coagulation detoxification and biodegradation was used to treat tire pyrolysis wastewater. Organics removal characteristics at the molecular level were investigated using electrospray ionization (ESI) coupled with Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS). The results showed that nearly 90% of the organic matter from the wastewater was removed through the process. Preference of the two coagulants for different classes of organics in tire pyrolysis wastewater was observed. The covalently bound inorganic-organic hybrid coagulant (CBHyC) used in this work had a complementary relationship with biodegradation for the organics removal: this coagulant reduced toxicity and enhanced the biodegradation by preferentially removing refractory substances such as lignin with a high degree of oxidation (O/C > 0.3). This study provides molecular insight into the organics of tire pyrolysis wastewater removed by a combined treatment process, supporting the advancement and application of waste rubber recycling technology. It also contributes to the possible development of an effective treatment process for refractory wastewater.