Multivariate drought analysis for the temperature homogeneous regions of India: Lessons from the Gomati River basin

Abstract

Droughts inflict significant loss on agricultural economies. Gomati River basin, the area of the present study, is located within the Ganga River floodplains, which approximately coincide with the north central temperature homogeneous region (NCTHR) of India. Gomati basin is a non-perennial one supporting water intensive agricultural crops. To ascertain the occurrence of droughts (if any) from 1986 to 2015 within Gomati River basin, in terms of inter-dependencies of drought causing variables through study of multivariate drought indices, is the main objective of the present study. Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was used in combination with the Copula approach to construct multivariate standardized drought indices (MSDIs) for drought onset detection through simulation in the face of data scarcity. Although MSDI based assessment of the basin as a whole did not detect any droughts, in the upper basin, MSDIs indicated the possibilities of impending agricultural droughts marked by their consistent variability around near-normal conditions. This methodology can be used to detect drought situations in data scarce non-perennial river basins within the Ganga River floodplains including the NCTHR of India.

Projected climate extremes over agro-climatic zones of Ganga River Basin under 1.5, 2, and 3° global warming levels

“…Being the most populated and largest river basin in India, it is evident that a large portion of the population of India is affected by climate extremes in the basin. Ganga river basin due to its varying physiological conditions experiences several extreme climatic events, for example, cloudbursts (Mishra et al, 2022), rainfall extremes (Swarnkar et al, 2021), droughts (Bhatt et al, 2022), avalanches (Thayyen et al, 2021), etc. Therefore, it is essential to study the impact of temperature extremes on the population of the region as humans are negatively affected in every aspect socially and economically.…”

Future prediction of water balance using SWAT and CA-Markov methods under recent climate projections: A case study of the Silwani watershed (Jharkhand), India

“…The climate change impact is more pronounced on SWAT sensitivity parameters compared to the LULC change for Dharoi catchment, India (Sharma et al, 2022). SWAT in combination with copula statistics was applied to detect drought onset for Gomti River basin, India (Bhatt et al, 2022). Many previous studies have been conducted using combination of SWAT model and CA-Markov model to predict future water balance of the area (Gong et al, 2019;Ji et al, 2021;Ghodichore et al, 2022).…”