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One of the most severe natural calamities is the drought which has a long-term effect towards agriculture, water, and humans. The rate of drought has also increased in this century due to scanty rainfall and rise in temperature. India being an agrarian country has been highly affected due to drought and it is highly necessary to use an overarching approach for the assessment of agricultural drought risk. An approach to find out agricultural drought risk is to amalgamate risk components such as exposure, vulnerability and hazard with certain influencing suitable criteria or datasets. Karnataka has been chosen as the study area because of its high probability of Drought risk for which it comes under the top 10 drought prone state in India. According to statistics and reports, 16 districts of Karnataka are the top 24 drought prone district of India. A total of 11 criterions or datasets has been identified which would go under the three risk components among which 6 criterions are static and 5 criterions are of the quarterly time series. Fuzzy logic (Fuzzy membership function and fuzzy overlay function) technique is use prepare the three risk components and there after integrated to create drought risk map. A crop mask is used over the drought risk to establish agricultural drought risk map. The result showed the quarterly agricultural drought risk over the study area where under each quarter changes of risk zone is observed. The district Belagavi is found to have around 45.74% (6134.875 km2) of its area under drought throughout the drought quarters. The results were validated externally with the help of Karnataka Government’s drought monitoring map where both the maps showed 24 out of 30 districts under severe drought.
Key Words: Fuzzy Membership Function; Agricultural drought; Fuzzy Overlay; Risk Assessment; Karnataka.
