Drought Monitoring: Emerging Technology Plants the Seeds for Better Farming

January 28, 2025

Drought is an age-old foe, responsible for crop failures and famine. It has even toppled empires. But satellites and precision agriculture are rewriting that story, raising hope that humanity could turn a centuries-old scourge into a manageable challenge.

“Plants are central to a wide range of human needs, including food, fiber for clothing, animal feed and even energy. A changing climate threatens those needs,” according to IEEE Member Euclides Chuma.

“Plants are essential for a sustainable human lifestyle. Therefore, drought monitoring is essential so humans can understand the impact of climate change on agriculture and have time to take action for drought mitigation,” Chuma added.

Monitoring Drought From Space

Satellites can be useful for monitoring drought in two main ways. First, they can offer high-quality images with special cameras.

“Satellites measure different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to analyze conditions on the ground and weather in the air,” said IEEE Senior Member Shawn Chandler. “The satellite functions by assessing the absorption and emission of different wavelengths of energy such as infrared, microwave and visible light.”

Using visible light sensing, satellites can monitor water levels in lakes and rivers and determine amounts of vegetation cover across large land areas as indicators of drought, Chandler explains. They can also monitor precipitation, temperature and contribute to evaluations of short-term weather patterns, which contribute to the understanding of soil moisture levels. Satellites using microwave sensing technology can observe soil moisture due to water’s scattering effect, and based on known crop types, can help to determine anomalies and threats to crop health.

The emerging use of low-orbit satellites offers a second path to drought monitoring because they provide internet connectivity for remote areas. Global connectivity in agricultural fields allows farmers to use smart sensors to transmit data on soil and plant status to data centers, where high-powered computers can make sense of the information. The integration of satellite imagery and IoTs devices offers a comprehensive approach to drought management.

That integration of internet-connected smart sensors in farms is often referred to as precision farming, which seeks to find a “goldilocks zone” for plants — not too much water that it evaporates and is wasted, but not so little that the plant grows less than it could.

“Omnipresent internet connections and IoT technology will offer a lot of precision data that can be used in conjunction with AI algorithms to identify drought in farms much more than it is today,” Chuma said.

On the Horizon: Using Cellular Infrastructure To Monitor Drought

One reason satellites have been deployed to monitor drought is that there simply aren’t enough sensors in enough places on earth to do the job adequately. In recent years, however, there has been increased interest in using data from systems or technologies that weren’t originally designed to monitor weather.

The practice is known as opportunistic sensing. One method that has gained traction is to rely on data from cell phone towers to monitor rain – or the lack of it. The idea is based on the fact that cellular technology has become ubiquitous. Wherever there are people, there are cellular towers. In 2006, IEEE Life Fellow Hagit Messer and a team of researchers realized that signals in cellular towers changed in response to different weather patterns, and this data could be used for environmental monitoring. Messer, who won the 2024 IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies for the research, later showed that the system could also be used for early flood warning.

Learn More: Check out the IEEE Planet Positive 2030 Initiative from the IEEE Standards Association. It’s an all-of-IEEE effort to bring together technologists, economists, sociologists, educators, policy-makers and others to identify sustainable and practical technology solutions.