East African drought monitoring during rainy seasons

East Africa have suffered severe drought, and it caused damage to agricultural sector. The severe drought during the long rain season in 2011 drove significant damage. Especially, drought monitoring over Africa is difficult due to the availability of station data. In addition, there are no starting and ending points of drought. Satellite data is useful to monitor drought because it provides spatiotemporal continuous surface data including surface temperature, vegetation, soil moisture, and evapotranspiration. Many studied were conducted to develop drought indices using satellite data. In this study, East African drought was monitored using various drought indices. We analyzed the relationship between the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and East African drought during the two rainy seasons using satellite and station based drought indices. Three drought indices including Standard Precipitation Index (SPI), Evaporative Stress Index (ESI), and scaled drought condition index (SDCI) were used. In this study, two interesting results were found. The relationship between the ENSO and precipitation of East Africa during the long rain season was changed in recent years, and it was identified using in situ, satellite, and reanalysis data. Drought is affected by regional characteristics including land cover and topography, so the detected drought is different by spatial scale (e.g., regional, local).