Agricultural Stress Index System (ASIS)

Agricultural Stress Index System (ASIS) is a global agricultural drought monitoring system developed and operated by FAO which enables to monitor agricultural areas affected by dry spells, or severe drought in extreme cases, using satellite data. It provides a collective quick-look indicators that facilitate the early identification of cropland/grassland with a high likelihood of water stress (drought). ASIS related products (maps, zonal statistics) are processed by FAO GIEWS (Global Information and Early Warning System on Food and Agriculture) every 10 days. Pre-processed, published-ready maps, zonal statistics of ASIS are published FAO GIEWS Earth Observation website at: https://www.fao.org/giews/earthobservation/index.jsp?lang=en. All ASIS raster datasets are accessible through the FAO Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Portal, Web Map Service (WMS) and Google Earth Engine (GEE). More information, please visit ASIS Data Access page: https://www.fao.org/giews/earthobservation/access.jsp?lang=en Agricultural Stress Index System is composed of two type of indicators: seasonal indicators such as Agricultural Stress Index (ASI) to detect the severe agricultural drought, Drought Intensity to classify the severity of the drought and no-seasonal indicators, such as vegetation indicators (NDVI anomaly, VCI and VHI). The seasonal indicators are designed to allow easy identification of areas of cropped land with a high likelihood of water stress (drought). The indices are based on remote sensing data of vegetation and land surface temperature combined with information on agricultural cropping cycles derived from historical data and a global crop mask. The final maps highlight anomalous vegetation growth and potential drought in crop zones during the growing season. In ASIS, two cropping cycles (major season /minor season) and crop/grassland zones are applied. Some countries have three or four crop seasons within a crop year. For these countries, Global ASIS cannot properly capture the agricultural drought occurred between the first and the last season (e.g. for a country has four crop seasons, the drought occurred during the 2nd and 3rd season). The satellite data used in the calculation of the mean VHI and the ASI is the 10-day (dekadal) vegetation data from the METOP-AVHRR sensor at 1 km resolution (2007 and after). Data at 1 km resolution for the period 1984-2006 was derived from the NOAA-AVHRR dataset at 16 km resolution. The crop/grass mask is FAO GLC-SHARE. Pixel with at least 5% covered by the class is defined as a cropland/grassland pixel. Data license policy: Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC BY-NC- SA 3.0 IGO) Recommended citation: © FAO - Agricultural Stress Index System (ASIS), http://www.fao.org/giews/earthobservation/, [Date accessed] For more information, please visit GIEWS Earth Observation website.