Drought Characteristic Analysis Based on an Improved PDSI in the Wei River Basin of China

Abstract

Abstract:In this study, to improve the efficiency of the original Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI_original), we coupled the Soil and Water Assessment tool (SWAT) and PDSI_original to construct a drought index called PDSI_SWAT. The constructed PDSI_SWAT is applied in the Wei River Basin (WRB) of China during 1960-2012. The comparison of the PDSI_SWAT with four other commonly used drought indices reveals the effectiveness of the PDSI_SWAT in describing the drought propagation processes in WRB. The whole WRB exhibits a dry trend, with more significant trends in the northern, southeastern and western WRB than the remaining regions. Furthermore, the drought frequencies show that drought seems to occur more likely in the northern part than the southern part of WRB. The principle component analysis method based on the PDSI_SWAT reveals that the whole basin can be further divided into three distinct sub-regions with different drought variability, i.e., the northern, southeastern and western part. Additionally, these three sub-regions are also consistent with the spatial pattern of drought shown by the drought frequency. The wavelet transform analysis method indicates that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events have strong impacts on inducing droughts in the WRB. The results of this study could be beneficial for a scientific water resources management and drought assessment in the current study area and also provide a valuable reference for other areas with similar climatic characteristics.

Characteristics and prediction of extreme drought event using LSTM model in Wei River Basin

“…It was found that the study area showed a general trend of drying out by Mann-Kendall test. Zou et al (2017) founded that a trendency to dry out can be observed during 1961 to 2012 in the WRB, this is consistent with the findings of this paper. The results also found that both the accumulation time of extreme drought and the maximum time of extreme drought in Guanzhong Plain were much higher than those in other regions, which indicated that the drought situation in Guanzhong area was more severe.…”

An analysis of droughts in Iran during 1988–2017

“…This can subsequently be used in regional risk assessment. In climate studies, PCA is mostly applied to reduce the number of variables and produce factors that will explain most of the variance or analyze spatial and temporal variability of various phenomena such as drought (see [16,39,40,48,65,66,86].…”

The Long-Time Variation of Lake in Typical Desert Area and Its Human and Climate Change Causes: A Case Study of the Hongjian Nur

“…It can clearly reveal the various change periods hidden in the time series and reflect the change trend of the system in different time scales to estimate the future trend of the data series [28]. Because the change of climate characteristics caused by precipitation has multi-time scale and is continuous, the continuous wavelet transforms using complex Morlet wavelets is a robust tool to analyze the change characteristics of years of PDSI time series [29]. However, there are few studies on the correlation analysis between the variation period of PDSI and the area of surface waters.…”