Drought identification based on Palmer drought severity index and return period analysis of drought characteristics in Huaibei Plain China

Abstract

The threshold level method for drought identification is challenging due to the problems of selection of drought index reflecting the drought process associated with water supply and demand as well as the underlying physical meaning of drought thresholds. The frequently used hydrological drought indices (e.g., runoff) are susceptible to being affected by human activities, and drought characteristics are incapable of revealing spatial and temporal comparability. Furthermore, the drought process with the same severity but a longer duration is more likely to be evaluated as a more severe event, which contradicts the actual drought situation. In this study, the Palmer drought severity index (PDSI) method, in which the meteorological factors less influenced by human activities were taken as the input, was adopted to determine the dry/wet states and the PDSI value at each period firstly. The dry/wet states were defined with dry period, wet period, transition period, transition period in dry spell, and transition period in a wet spell. Following that, drought identification criteria were established through the dry/wet states and PDSI value according to the consistency of the identified results and the actual drought situations. Particularly, drought severity and peak intensity were taken as drought characteristics in this paper, and the joint return periods of the characteristics were estimated based on the Gumbel-Hougaard copula function. And eventually, a case study was conducted in Huaibei Plain, China. The results showed that the most severe droughts identified by PDSI had a good consistency with the actual drought situations, drought severity and peak intensity were applicable to reflect the drought impacts. It is worth noting that the implications of the joint return period and the relationships among different types of them. The occurrence probability of a multi-characteristic drought event should be calculated by the integration of joint probability density function over the region corresponding to the event of interest, and the joint frequency of drought characteristics should not be used as the occurrence probability of the drought disaster losses greater (or less) than that caused by the drought with the same characteristics. In addition, drought processes identified by PDSI and standardized precipitation indices (SPI) from monthly and seasonal scales were compared, indicating the drought identified results through PDSI are almost consistent with the actual situations.

Keywords: Drought characteristics; Drought identification; GH copula; Huaibei plain; Palmer drought severity index; Return period.