Besides the station-based drought indices, drought impact on vegetation has been observed
through satellite-based drought indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation
Index (NDVI) and The Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) (Li et al. 2013). NDVI has
been used for land cover classification, land use change detection, drought monitoring,
vegetation dynamics observations and estimating ecosystem carbon and moisture fluxes in
global change studies (Glenn et al. 2008; Zeng and Yang 2008). VCI was later developed
from NDVI to detect the vegetation condition from extremely bad to optimal conditions
(Kogan 1995). VCI assesses the relative change in the NDVI signal through time and
reduces the influence of spatial variability in NDVI phenology between different land
cover types (Karnieli et al. 2010). The satellite-based drought indices have been applied for
drought detection more effectively than station-based measurement because of data
available continuously in both spatial and temporal scales (Jain et al. 2010). NDVI and
VCI have been successfully used to identify drought severity and affected areas in many