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Drought is one of the costliest natural disasters in the Sudano-sahel region of Nigeria.
It is expected that droughts will be more frequent, as a result of global climatic change which is a
consequent of increase in temperature and abrupt changes in precipitation. It is well known that
drought monitoring has been based on weather station observations, which lack the continuous
spatial coverage needed to adequately characterize and monitor detailed spatial patterns of drought
conditions. Satellite remote sensing observations can provide a synoptic view of the land and provide
a spatial context for measuring drought. Therefore this study seek to analyse the land use and land
cover pattern, the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Normalize Differential
Water Index (NDWI) over Kano metropolis, Nigeria at different time intervals (1986. 1999, 2005,
2012), with a view to investigate drought occurrence in the region. Landsat TM satellite image of
1986, 1999 and landsat ETM of 2005, 2012 for the month of October of Kano Metropolis obtained from
Global Land Cover Facility, GLCF website were utilized in the study. Supervised classification method
was adopted to classify the landsat imageries into five (5) classes using Integrated Land and Water
Information System. The image classification analysis shows a rapid growth in built-up land from
9.54% in 1986 to 23.15% in 2012. The study area witnessed a decrease in vegetation cover from 61.94%
in 1986 to 43.33% in 2012. The implication of the spatial pattern of land use and land cover in the area
are accelerated socio-economic activities, shortage of food, prevalence of drought conditions,
desertification and increase in temperature. The NDVI results show an improvement in the
photosynthetic activity of the vegetation from 1986 to 2005, then a drop in 2012. The NDWI result
show a very low value in 1986 which could lead to drought condition but increases
rapidly through 1999 to 2005, then decrease in 2012. Generally, both the NDWI and NDVI results
show that year 1986 depicts drought condition but there was an improvement in rainfall and favorable
condition for vegetation growth for the other years. However, the decrease observed in year 2012 shows
that the area is susceptible to drought occurrence due to the reduction of vegetative cover in the study
area.
Keywords: Remote sensing, drought, precipitation, NDVI, NDWI