Integrated drought causality, hazard, and vulnerability assessment for future socioeconomic scenarios: An information theory perspective

Abstract

Drought properties and the socioeconomic impact it makes are expected to increase in the coming years due to climate change. Here we review the possible impacts of changes in climate variability on the properties of different drought types. The downscaled and bias-corrected data from five general circulation models (GCMs) were used to produce an ensemble of precipitation, temperature, and wind speed, through a relative entropy approach and were used for drought analysis. A novel Multivariate Drought Index was then employed for an integrated quantification of all physical forms of drought. We studied the spatial patterns of drought properties and performed multivariate frequency analysis for each planning region in Texas to recognize the distribution of potential drought hazard areas under climate change impact by formulating a Drought Hazard Index. A drought vulnerability assessment was also carried out by taking into consideration various socioeconomic factors, leading to the development of socioeconomic Drought Vulnerability Index. A set of composite drought risk maps that combines hazard and vulnerability analysis were developed. This study also explored the cause-effect relationship between the drought events and several hydroclimatic triggers. A transfer entropy measure was used to quantify the causal relationships, thus indicating the predominant future drought triggers. Overall, the findings are expected to help achieve an effective drought mitigation strategy for the state of Texas.

Hydrological Drought in the Anthropocene: Impacts of Local Water Extraction and Reservoir Regulation in the U.S.

“…Recent drought research has emphasized the role of climate drivers, but drought management and quantification can be improved by adopting an integrated framework that considers both human and climate factors (Mishra & Singh, ; Rajsekhar et al, , ; Van Loon, Gleeson, et al, ). Wanders and Wada () evaluated human and climate impacts on future hydrological drought globally.…”

Assessment of Future Drought Conditions in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed

“…Low winter precipitation and decreased mountain snowpack, which are the telltale signs of global warming Swain et al, 2014), aggravated the severity of this drought (Mao et al, 2015). In addition, various global climate models (GCMs) projected that drying tendencies in soil moisture, streamflow, and precipitation would occur in many parts of low-and mid-latitude countries due to increases in GHG and global warming (Wang, 2005;Burke et al, 2006;Sheffield and Wood, 2008;Dai, 2011Dai, , 2013Kumar et al, 2014;Mishra et al, 2014;Chen et al, 2015;Rajsekhar et al, 2015;Thilakarathne and Sridhar, 2017). Furthermore, there is a significant trend that dry areas become drier and wet areas become wetter with a poleward enlargement of the subtropical dry zones (Tallaksen and Van Lanen, 2004).…”

Multilevel Drought Hazard Assessment under Climate Change Scenarios in Semi-Arid Regions—A Case Study of the Karkheh River Basin in Iran

“…To aggregate the severity and occurrence probability features of each index into one unique index for the entire study period, we calculated the Drought Hazard Index (DHI) using the methodology proposed by Shahid et al [62] and later by Rajsekhar et al [63]. In this method, each of the four drought classes is given a particular weight from 1 to 4, which represent mild (W 1 ), moderate (W 2 ), severe (W 3 ), and extreme droughts (W 4 ), respectively (Table 2).…”