No abstract

The Canadian Prairie drought of 1999-2005 negatively affected several activities including agriculture, stream flow, hydro-electric production and forest fires. However, surface drought conditions and associated impacts were neither spatially nor temporally uniform. Following an assessment of several gridded temperature and precipitation datasets, this study incorporates the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) to characterize the surface features of the 1999-2005 Prairie drought in terms of its origin, spatial propagation, persistence and termination. This includes the development and application of a newly proposed multi-stage concept to characterize and classify drought. These characteristics are then compared to previous major Prairie droughts in the instrumental record.