A Time-Dependent Drought Index for Non-Stationary Precipitation Series

Yixuan Wang, Jianzhu Li (), Ping Feng and Rong Hu

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2015, vol. 29, issue 15, 5647 pages

Abstract: In a rapidly changing environment, a greater concern about the establishment and improvement of drought indices is expected. The main goal of this study is to develop and apply a time-dependent Standardized Precipitation Index (SPIt) that takes account of the possible non-stationary behaviors in precipitation records. Summer precipitation observations (1959 ~ 2011) from 21 raingauge stations in the Luanhe River basin are fitted with non-stationary Gamma distributions respectively by means of the Generalized Additive Models in Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS). The temporal variability of the distribution’s parameter (related to the mean) is flexibly described by an optimized polynomial function. Based on the non-stationary distribution, the SPIt is calculated and then employed to assess the spatio-temporal characteristics of summer drought in the basin. Results of the non-stationary modeling indicate an overall decreasing trend in the summer precipitation during 1959 ~ 2011, and especially a significant decrease in the period of 2000 to 2011. The SPIt is found to be more robust and reliable compared with the traditional Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). Moreover, remarkable difference is observed between the historical drought assessments of SPIt and SPI in the Luanhe River basin, implying that the non-stationarity of hydrological time series cannot be ignored in drought analyses and forecasts. The proposed SPIt method can be a feasible alternative for drought monitoring under non-stationary conditions, intended to provide a valuable reference for further studies. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Drought; Standardized precipitation index; Time-dependent standardized precipitation index; Non-stationarity; GAMLSS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11269-015-1138-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:waterr:v:29:y:2015:i:15:p:5631-5647

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-015-1138-0

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().