Abstract. The monthly standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) can
be used to monitor and assess drought characteristics with 1-month or
longer drought duration. Based on data from 1961 to 2018 at 427
meteorological stations across mainland China, we developed a daily SPEI
dataset to overcome the shortcoming of the coarse temporal scale of monthly
SPEI. Our dataset not only can be used to identify the start and end dates
of drought events, but also can be used to investigate the meteorological,
agricultural, hydrological, and socioeconomic droughts with a different timescales. In the present study, the SPEI data with 3-month (about 90 d)
timescale were taken as a demonstration example to analyze spatial distribution
and temporal changes in drought conditions for mainland China. The SPEI
data with a 3-month (about 90 d) timescale showed no obvious intensifying
trends in terms of severity, duration, and frequency of drought events from
1961 to 2018. Our drought dataset serves as a unique resource with daily
resolution to a variety of research communities including meteorology,
geography, and natural hazard studies. The daily SPEI dataset developed is
free, open, and publicly available from this study. The dataset
with daily SPEI is publicly available via the figshare portal (Wang et al.,
2020c), with https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12568280.Highlights. A multi-scale daily SPEI dataset was developed across mainland China
from 1961 to 2018.
The daily SPEI dataset can be used to identify the start and end days of the
drought event.
The developed daily SPEI dataset in this study is free, open, and
publicly available.
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