Severity Assessment of Heavy Rainfall-Induced Mid-Season Adversity Under a Satellite-Based Crop Insurance Program: A Framework

Rapid, objective, and accurate crop damage assessment is essential to minimizing farmers’ financial loss and enabling early settlement of crop insurance. The present study proposes a framework for assessing the impact of heavy rainfall-induced flood on Kharif rice over West Bengal under a satellite-based crop insurance program. Daily actual and normal rainfall data from India Meteorological Department (IMD) were used to study the pattern and magnitude of rainfall to confirm the heavy rainfall incidence over affected districts of West Bengal. The Sentinel-1-derived temporal VH backscatter validated using ground observations was utilized to identify the rice crop areas. The backscatter difference images between pre-and post-peril periods, along with threshold and histogram approaches, were adopted to discriminate the inundated areas from non-inundated areas. The information on the inundated rice crop was derived by intersecting the rice layer with the inundated area. The behavior of temporal backscatter profiles, i.e., pre- and post-peril periods, was analyzed to ascertain the impacts of flood-induced inundation on rice crop health. Further, the phenological information during floods was identified from transplanting periods in backscatter profiles, and damage severity was assessed by integrating inundation, the affected area, and rice crop stage information. The outcomes, validated with ~1500 crop loss surveys (CLSs), show that the framework is effective and useful for crop insurance.