Drought-flood abrupt alteration events over China

Wuxia Bi; Meng Li; Baisha Weng; Denghua Yan; Zhaoyu Dong; Jianming Feng; Hao Wang

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162529

Drought-flood abrupt alteration events over China

Sci Total Environ. 2023 Jun 1:875:162529. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162529. Epub 2023 Mar 2.

Authors

Wuxia Bi¹, Meng Li², Baisha Weng³, Denghua Yan⁴, Zhaoyu Dong⁵, Jianming Feng⁵, Hao Wang⁵

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China; Research Center on Flood & Drought Disaster Prevention and Reduction of the Ministry of Water Resources, Beijing 100038, China; Yinshanbeilu Grassland Eco-hydrology National Observation and Research Station, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China; Institute of Water Resources and Hydrology Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China; Yinshanbeilu Grassland Eco-hydrology National Observation and Research Station, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China. Electronic address: wengbs@iwhr.com.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China; Yinshanbeilu Grassland Eco-hydrology National Observation and Research Station, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China.

PMID: 36870496
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162529

Abstract

Drought-flood abrupt alternation (DFAA) is characterized by a period of persistent drought followed by sudden heavy precipitation at a certain level, with impacts on ecosystems and socioeconomic environment. At present, previous studies have mainly focuses on the monthly scale and regional scale. However, this study proposed a multi-indicator daily-scale method for identifying the DFAA occurrence, and explored the DFAA events over China from 1961 to 2018. The DFAA events mainly occurred in the center and southeast of China, especially in the Yangtze River Basin, Pearl River Basin, Huai River Basin, Southeast Rivers Basin, and south part of the Southwest Rivers Basin. The spatial coverage has a statistically significant (p < 0.05) increasing trend over China, of 0.355 %/decade. The occurrence and spatial coverage of DFAA events increased by decades, and were mainly concentrated in summer (around 85 %). The possible formation mechanisms were closely related to global warming, atmospheric circulation index anomalies, soil properties (e.g., soil field capacity), etc.

Keywords: Daily scale; Drought-flood abrupt alternation; National scale; Precipitation; Soil moisture.