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Abstract
This study analyses meteorological, hydrological and agricultural droughts of an area and integrates using GIS. For retrieving and querying the data stored in the database interactively by the user, the study further looks at creating the GIS based Drought Information System. Palar and Thamiravaruni river basins, located in Northeast and Southwest parts of Tamil Nadu State, India, respectively were selected as the study areas. All the relevant hydrological and other data were collected for the period from 1971 to 2000. Map/Info GIS software, VERTICAL MAPPER version 2.5 and MS Excel were used in analysis. The assessment of meteorological drought severity was carried out by employing India Meteorologic Department (IMD) method. Hydrological drought analysis was carried out using Herbst method, by executing a program written in C language. Agricultural drought severity assessment was carried out for all blocks using remote sensing data. Satellite based drought assessment and monitoring methodology was applied using IRS WiFS data and satellite based vegetation index NDVI. GIS is used to integrate of meteorological, hydrological and physical nature of basin in order to map the drought risk areas. Drought Information System (DIS) was developed comprising of modules namely water related database, meteorological drought, hydrological drought, agricultural drought and drought risk area analysis.