Characterizing the Severity and Risk of Drought in the Poudre River, Colorado
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 131, Issue 5
Abstract
The implementation of water use restrictions in a given district is very much related to the severity of an evolving drought; thus, water management agencies such as City Water Departments often face the question of how critical or severe a particular drought event is. While this question has typically been examined using drought indices (e.g., the Palmer Drought Severity Index), unfortunately they do not provide any information on the frequency or recurrence time of the drought or on the risk that specific drought events may occur in a given time horizon. In this paper, the severity of alternative drought events are determined following a similar concept as for the severity of floods, i.e., the return period of a flood event, e.g., the flood. We develop procedures for determining drought severity based on historical data, generated data, and mathematical algorithms. In particular, we focus on the drought that has been occurring in the Western United States and take the Poudre River, Colo., as an example. The analysis was based on of records of naturalized flows of the Poudre River. A stochastic model was used for generating long-term synthetic flows, from which the return period and risk of drought events were determined. In addition, we used a mathematical algorithm for determining the distribution of drought events and their return periods. Assuming the sample mean as the water demand threshold, drought severity, frequency, and risk statistics were obtained; e.g., the severity of the (2000–2002) drought (i.e., drought with ) is of the order of a return period and the risk that such a drought will occur in a period is about 2.4%.
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Acknowledgments
The research reported herein has been a cooperative endeavor involving the Colorado State University (CSU) Drought Analysis and Management Laboratory (DroughtLab), the Water Resources Department of the City of Fort Collins, the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, and the University of Catania, Italy. Support from the CSU Colorado Experiment Station Project COL00701 on “Predicting the Severity of Low Flows and Droughts for Agricultural Systems in Colorado” is gratefully acknowledged.
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© 2005 ASCE.
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Received: Jan 15, 2003
Accepted: Sep 23, 2003
Published online: Sep 1, 2005
Published in print: Sep 2005
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