Bivariate Drought Characterization of Two Contrasting Climatic Regions in India Using Copula
Publication: Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 147, Issue 3
Abstract
This study aims to construct the multiple time-scale joint distributions of drought duration and severity using two-dimensional copulas and compare the drought characteristics in India’s two contrasting climate regions: the arid Rajasthan and humid, tropical Kerala. The drought occurrences were defined by the standardized precipitation index (SPI) with a threshold below at time scales of 3, 6, 12, and 24 months for 1900–2016. Significant correlations were noted between the drought severity and drought duration in both regions. The Clayton copula gave a better fit than other copulas for modeling the dependence among the observed drought duration and severity. The results indicate that the probability of short-term droughts (SPI-3 and SPI-6) is more significant than those of long-term droughts (SPI-12 and SPI-24) for an identical drought event in both regions. Also, the probability of severe drought events with greater duration and severity for long-term droughts (SPI-12 and SPI-24) is higher in Kerala than that in western Rajasthan. For all the time-scale SPIs, the conditional probability of drought severity for a given duration exceeding a threshold showed an increasing trend in both regions. Furthermore, the conditional probability of the drought duration given the severity for short-term droughts is greater than that of the long-term droughts for the same drought event. For short-term droughts, the conditional return period of an identical drought event is lower in Kerala than in western Rajasthan. In contrast, the conditional return period of long-term droughts is lower in western Rajasthan. Additionally, copula-based nonexceedance conditional distributions for the major crops were established based on rainfall.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available in a repository or online in accordance with funder data retention policies:
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Areal average rainfall from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Pune, India, at ftp://www.tropmet.res.in/pub/data/rain/iitm-subdivrf.txt.
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Copula R code generated from http://copula.r-forge.r-project.org/.
Some or all data, models, or codes that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request:
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Copula R code.
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Crop yield data.
Acknowledgments
The first two authors would like to thank the Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India, for providing Institutional Fellowships that enabled them to carry out the research.
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Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 147 • Issue 3 • March 2021
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© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 11, 2020
Accepted: Sep 29, 2020
Published online: Dec 23, 2020
Published in print: Mar 1, 2021
Discussion open until: May 23, 2021
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