Probabilistic Assessment of Hydrological Drought Using Hidden Markov Model in Han River Basin

Abstract

Various drought indices developed from previous studies can not consider the inherent uncertainty of drought because they assess droughts using a pre-defined threshold. In this study, to consider inherent uncertainty embedded in monthly streamflow data, Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based drought index (HMDI) was proposed and then probabilistic assessment of hydrologic drought was performed using HMDI instead of using pre-defined threshold. Using monthly streamflow data (1966～2009) of Pyeongchang river and Upper Namhan river provided by Water Management Information System (WAMIS), applying the HMM after moving-averaging the data with 3, 6, 12 month windows, this study calculated the posterior probability of hidden state that becomes the HMDI. For verifying the method, this study compared the HMDI and Standardized Streamflow Index (SSI) which is one of drought indices using a pre-defined threshold. When using the SSI, only one value can be used as a criterion to determine the drought severity. However, the HMDI can classify the drought condition considering inherent uncertainty in observations and show the probability of each drought condition at a particular point in time. In addition, the comparison results based on actual drought events occurred near the basin indicated that the HMDI outperformed the SSI to represent the drought events.