This monitoring period covers the harvestingof last year’s summer crops (cereals, spring barley and wheat) from October2015 to mid January of this year. Among the CropWatch agroclimatic indicators(Figure 3.18), compared with average, rainfall showed a sharp increase (+52%)except for Almaty City area (where there was an 8% decrease), an increasein temperature (+1.1%) and a sharp decrease of RADPAR (-9%), which combined toyield above average BIOMASS (+12%).

The maximum VCI indicates that crop conditionof most arable land in north Kazakhstan was below average (pixel values below0.5). The NDVI clusters indicate that crops were in poor condition fromOctober to middle December in the areas ofAktyubinskaya, Kustanayskaya, Severokazachstanskaya,Akmolinskaya, Pavlodarskaya, VostochnoKazachstanskayaand Almatinskaya Oblasts. No crop was planted since November and fromDecember the NDVI index has been close to zero. The crop condition developmentgraph also showed that crops were obviously worse off than last year and theaverage of the past five years, but favorable rainfall has provided the appropriatesoil moisture for the initial stages of the forthcoming crops.

Figure3.18. Kazakhstan crop condition, October2015-January 2016

(a)Crop condition development graph based on NDVI                           (b)Maximum VCI

(c)Spatial NDVI patterns compared to 5YA                                              (d)NDVI profiles