Mapping of rainfed areas in Tamil Nadu using Remote Sensing Technology

Abstract

A study was conducted to generate the satellite sensor-based map on rainfed cropland areas of Tamil Nadu using remote sensing derived variables and ancillary data. The study primarily utilized three remote sensing variables from different sensors viz., a temperature component using Land Surface Temperature (LST), a vegetation component using one of the vegetation related remote sensing variables and precipitation component using remotely sensed precipitation data for delineating rainfed cropland areas of Tamil Nadu. The study estimated the rainfed cropland areas of Tamil Nadu as 25.67 lakh ha. The rainfed cropland area found to be higher in Ramanathapuram (2.27 lakh ha) district followed by Villupuram (1.90 lakh ha) and Thoothukudi district (1.65 lakh ha). The lesser area, was recorded in Thanjavur, Tiruvarur and Tiruvallur districts of Tamil Nadu. Accuracy of rainfed area classes (rainfed Ground Truth points falling on rainfed area) was found to be 85 per cent with a kappa coefficient of 70 per cent of agreement between the ground control points and predicted map. The rainfed area map generated at lesser resolution with 70 per cent of kappa agreement indicated that the methodology has to be fine-tuned and the rainfed area map has to be generated at higher resolution using high-resolution satellite imageries.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.2019.000324

Pages

643 - 646

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords