Meteorological Drought Quantification with Standardized Precipitation Anomaly Index for the Regions with Strongly Seasonal and Periodic Precipitation
This article has a reply.
VIEW THE REPLYPublication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 20, Issue 12
Abstract
In this study, an index, named as standardized precipitation anomaly index (SPAI), is proposed for the meteorological drought quantification in the context of the monsoon-dominated climatology, where the precipitation is strongly seasonal and periodic. In the computation of SPAI, the anomalies of the precipitation are normalized rather than normalizing the raw precipitation series. The SPAI is compared with the standardized precipitation index (SPI), with respect to certain shortcomings of the latter. It is shown that the SPAI, owing to its design, is able to successfully differentiate between the consequences of shortages/surplus in rainfall in the monsoon and nonmonsoon months which is not possible through SPI. The unique suitability of SPAI for monsoon dominated regions is also illustrated by comparing its premise of development with that of the standardized nonstationary precipitation index (SnsPI). Further, drought quantification through the SPAI is shown to be applicable for both periodic and nonperiodic precipitation series. This is demonstrated using a typical strongly periodic precipitation series (from India) and a typical nonperiodic precipitation series (from Arkansas, United States of America). As compared with SPI, the SPAI is found to have a better coherence with the consequences of droughts and wet spells faced by the country (India, as the study area) in the past.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) through sponsored Project No. IIT/SRIC/CE/PMA/2013-14/5.
References
Bothe, O., Fraedrich, K., and Zhu, X. (2010). “The large-scale circulations and summer drought and wetness on the Tibetan plateau.” Int. J. Climatol., 30, 844–855.
Dracup, J. A., Lee, K. S., and Paulson, E. G., Jr. (1980). “On the definition of droughts.” Water Resour. Res., 16(2), 297–302.
Dubrovsky, M., et al. (2009). “Application of relative drought indices in assessing climate-change impacts on drought conditions in Czechia.” Theor. Appl. Climatol., 96(1–2), 155–171.
Edwards, D. C., and McKee, T. B. (1997). “Characteristics of 20th century drought in The United States at multiple time scales.”, 〈http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/edwards.pdf〉 (Apr. 20, 2015).
Guttman, N. B. (1999). “Accepting the standandardized precipitation index: A calculation algorithm.” J. Am. Water Resour. Assoc., 35(2), 311–322.
Haan, C. T. (1977). Statistical methods in hydrology, Iowa State University Press, Ames, IA.
Heim, R. R., Jr. (2002). “A review of twentieth-century drought indices used in the United States.” Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 83(8), 1149–1165.
Husak, G. J., Michaelson, J., and Funk, C. (2007). “Use of the gamma distribution to represent monthly rainfall in Africa for drought monitoring applications.” Int. J. Climatol., 27(7), 935–944.
IAG (State Inter Agency Group). (2013). Dept. of Disaster Management, Govt. of West Bengal, 〈http://www.iagwestbengal.org.in/disaster-flood.html〉 (Aug. 2, 2013).
Lloyd-Hughes, B., and Saunders, M. A. (2002). “A drought climatology for Europe.” Int. J. Climatol., 22(13), 1571–1592.
López-Moreno, J. I., Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Beguerí, S., García-Ruiz, J. M., Portela, M. M., and Almeida, A. B. (2009). “Dam effects on droughts magnitude and duration in a transboundary basin: The Lower River Tagus, Spain and Portugal.” Water Resour. Res., 45(2), W02405.
Makkonen, L. (2006). “Plotting positions in extreme value analysis.” J. Appl. Meteorol. Climatol., 45(2), 334–340.
Mallya, G., Tripathi, S., Kirshner, S., and Govindaraju, R. S. (2013). “Probabilistic assessment of drought characteristics using hidden Markov model.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 834–845.
McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., and Kleist, J. (1993). “The relationship of drought frequency and duration to time scales.” Proc., 8th Conf. of Applied Climatology, American Meterological Society, Boston, 179–184.
McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., and Kleist, J. (1995). “Drought monitoring with multiple time scales.” 9th Conf. on Applied Climatology, American Mathematical Society, Dallas, 233–236.
McRoberts, B., and Nielsen-Gammon, J. (2011). “A modified standardized precipitation index for drought monitoring.” Symp. on Data-Driven Approaches to Droughts, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN.
Mihajlović, D. (2006). “Monitoring the 2003–2004 meteorological drought over pannonian part of Croatia.” Int. J. Climatol., 26(15), 2213–2225.
Mishra, A. K., and Desai, V. R. (2005). “Spatial and temporal drought analysis in the Kansabati River basin, India.” Int. J. River Basin Manage., 3(1), 31–41.
Mooley, D. A., and Parthasarathy, B. (1984). “Fluctuations in all india summer monsoon rainfall during 1871–1978.” Clim. Change, 6(3), 287–301.
MOSPI (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation). (2012). “Quarterly estimates of gross domestic product for the second quarter (July–September) of 2012–13.” 〈http://mospi.nic.in/mospi_new/upload/NAD_Press_Note_31aug12.pdf〉 (Apr. 20, 2015).
NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau). (2009). “Profile of suicide victims categorized by profession (Table 2.11).” 〈http://ncrb.nic.in/CD-ADSI2009/table–2.11.pdf〉 (Aug. 2, 2013).
Ntale, H. K., and Gan, T. Y. (2003). “Drought indices and their application to east Africa.” Int. J. Climatol., 23(11), 1335–1357.
Pietzsch, S., and Bissolli, P. (2011). “A modified drought index for WMO RA VI.” Adv. Sci. Res., 6, 275–279.
Rouault, M., and Richard, Y. (2003). “Intensity and spatial extension of drought in South Africa at different time scales.” Water South Africa, 29(4), 489–500.
Russo, S., Dosio, A., Sterl, A., Barbosa, P., and Vogt, J. (2013). “Projection of occurrence of extreme dry-wet years and seasons in Europe with stationary and nonstationary standardized precipitation indices.” J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118(14), 7628–7639.
Türkeş, M., and Tatli, H. (2009). “Use of the standardized precipitation index (SPI) and a modified SPI for shaping the drought probabilities over Turkey.” Int. J. Climatol., 29, 2270–2282.
Vicente-Serrano, S. M., et al. (2012). “Performance of drought indices for ecological, agricultural, and hydrological applications.” Earth Interact., 16(10), 1–27.
Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Begueria, S., Lopez-Moreno, J. I., Angulo, M., and El Kenawy, A. (2010). “A new global 0.5 degrees gridded dataset (1901–2006) of a multiscalar drought index: Comparison with current drought index datasets based on the palmer drought severity index.” J. Hydrometeorol., 11(4), 1033–1043.
Wilhite, D. A., and Glantz, M. H. (1985). “Understanding the drought phenomenon: The role of definitions.” Water Int., 10(3), 111–120.
Wu, H., Hayes, J. T., Wilhite, D. A., and Svoboda, M. D. (2005). “The effect of the length of record on the standardized precipitation index.” Int. J. Climatol., 25(4), 505–520.
Wu, H., Svoboda, M. D., Hayes, M. J., Wilhite, D. A., and Wen, F. (2007). “Appropriate application of the standardized precipitation index in arid locations and dry seasons.” Int. J. Climatol., 27(1), 65–79.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 16, 2014
Accepted: Mar 23, 2015
Published online: May 27, 2015
Discussion open until: Oct 27, 2015
Published in print: Dec 1, 2015
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.