Received April 15, 2020, accepted April 29, 2020, date of publication May 7, 2020, date of current version June 1, 2020. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2993025 Monitoring of Drought Condition and Risk in Bangladesh Combined Data From Satellite and Ground Meteorological Observations FOYEZ AHMED PRODHAN 1,2,3 , JIAHUA ZHANG 1,2 , YUN BAI 1,2,4 , TIL PRASAD PANGALI SHARMA 1,2 , AND UPAMA ASHISH KOJU 1,2 1 Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China 2 College of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China 3 Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University, Gazipur 1706, Bangladesh 4 Remote Sensing Information and Digital Earth Center, College of Computer Science and Technology, Qingdao University, Qingdao 266071, China Corresponding author: Jiahua Zhang (zhangjh@radi.ac.cn) This work was supported in part by the CAS Strategic Priority Research Program under Grant XDA19030402, in part by the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 31671585 and Grant 41871253, in part by the Key Basic Research Project of Shandong Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant ZR2017ZB0422, and in part by the ‘‘Taishan Scholar’’ Project of Shandong Province under Grant TSXZ201712. ABSTRACT Drought is a very complex natural hazard and has a negative impact on the global ecosystem as a whole. Recently Bangladesh has been experiencing by different degree of dryness as a consequence of high climate variability, affecting the crop production to a great extent in the last couple of decades. In this context, the present study was made an effort to assess and analyse drought characteristics based on two drought indices, i.e., Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), and model agricultural drought risk with Fast-and-frugal decision tree (FFT) model in Bangladesh from 2001 to 2016. We identified drought occurrence and its dynamics with three-time scale, i.e., SPI3J (November-January), SPI3A (February-April) and SPI6A (November-April), and three rice-growing sea- sons, i.e., Aus (March-July), Aman (June-November), and Boro (November-May) from TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) and MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) data. The results demonstrate that TRMM had good consistency with rain gauge measurement compared to CHIRPS (Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data) and PERSIANN-CDR (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks-Climate Data Record) data to derive SPI3J, SPI3A and SPI6A. Overall results confirmed that more drought frequency observed in SPI6A than SPI3J and SPI3A time scale, representing moderate to severe drought throughout the country. Regarding agricultural drought resulting from VCI demonstrated Boro rice-growing season as more vulnerable crop growing season affected by severe to extreme drought event. Validation results of VCI exhibited a high correlation with rice yield data than in-situ soil moisture data. Results of the FFT model show that out of ten predictor variables SPI3J and SPI6A caused agricultural drought with SPI value less than -1.08 and -1.21 respectively. Additionally, the model characterized SPI3J and SPI6A as the most critical driving factors with the highest balanced accuracy triggering agricultural drought risk in Bangladesh. INDEX TERMS Drought, SPI, VCI, TRMM, MODIS, Bangladesh. I. INTRODUCTION Drought is natural repetitive phenomena causing destruc- tive disasters that considerably influence the environment, agriculture and economy of a country. Bangladesh has an agricultural-based economy and recently has made tremen- dous progress in agriculture, making the country self- sufficient in crop production and ensuring food security, The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Muhammad Imran . which has a positive impact on poverty alleviation [1]. However, the agricultural sector is being exposed to more susceptible to climate change variability. The climate change variability is mainly due to its location in the tropics, low elevation above sea level, and high population pres- sure makes the country more prone to disaster. Drought, flood, cyclones, sea-level rise, etc. are major climatic dis- asters in Bangladesh affected by climate change variability. Among these disasters, Bangladesh has been affected by dif- ferent degree of drought in the last couple of decades affecting 93264 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ VOLUME 8, 2020