Climatological Drought Analyses and Projection Using SPI and PDSI: Case Study of the Arkansas Red River Basin
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 18, Issue 7
Abstract
This paper examines past drought and assesses future drought scenarios for the Arkansas Red River Basin using two common drought indexes, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). Historical climate data within the 1900–2009 time frame were used to derive the past drought index estimates. The projected climate data under two greenhouse gas emission scenarios from 16 global climate models (GCMs) after bias correction and statistical downscaling were applied in drought occurrence frequency and affected area projection. The results derived from the SPI and PDSI show that widespread droughts mainly took place in the 1910s, 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s in the Arkansas Red River Basin, which agrees well with the historical climate record. Both the SPI and PDSI project that more frequent and severe droughts will appear in the second part of the 21st century under both of the emissions scenarios. Future PDSI projects that more severe droughts will occur in the western parts of this basin under one scenario.
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Acknowledgments
This research is funded by the Southern Climate Information Planning Program (SCIPP) (http://www.southernclimate.org). The authors thank the National Weather Center for their computing resources and also acknowledge their colleagues within the Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing Laboratory (http://hydro.ou.edu) for their technical support. In addition, the authors acknowledge the modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multimodel data sets. Support of these data sets is provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. Also, the authors acknowledge the PRISM Climate Group for providing PRISM precipitation data.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 18 • Issue 7 • July 2013
Pages: 809 - 816
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 29, 2011
Accepted: Mar 23, 2012
Published online: Jun 14, 2013
Published in print: Jul 1, 2013
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