Future changes in meteorological drought characteristics over Bangladesh projected by the CMIP5 multi-model ensemble

Jamal Uddin Khan (), A. K. M. Saiful Islam (), Mohan K. Das (), Khaled Mohammed (), Sujit Kumar Bala () and G. M. Tarekul Islam ()
Additional contact information
Jamal Uddin Khan: Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)
A. K. M. Saiful Islam: Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)
Mohan K. Das: Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)
Khaled Mohammed: Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)
Sujit Kumar Bala: Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)
G. M. Tarekul Islam: Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)

Climatic Change, 2020, vol. 162, issue 2, No 29, 667-685

Abstract: Abstract Drought is an inconspicuous natural disaster. In a warmer world, the severity and coverage of drought are expected to change, and it is essential to study these changes at smaller scale. This study detected changes in drought frequency, severity, and intensity in Bangladesh from a bias-corrected CMIP-5 multi-model projection of 11 members under a business-as-usual RCP8.5 scenario. We have used two well-known meteorological drought indices, Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Precipitation and Evaporation Index (SPEI). SPI is solely based on precipitation, while SPEI considers climatic water balance and incorporates the effect of temperature. Two different methods of estimation of potential evapotranspiration (PET), namely Thornthwaite and Hargreaves methods, are explored. SPEI-based drought identification is found to have high sensitivity among these PET estimation methods. In Bangladesh, SPI-based analysis suggests virtually no change in the long-term drought (12-monthly) condition and a minor change in short-term (6-monthly or less) droughts. SPEI evaluated with Hargreaves method projects a similar scenario for long-term droughts but an increase in both drought frequency and severity in short timescales. At seasonal scale, winter and pre-monsoon are projected to be potentially more affected by water stress in the future. A spatially coherent shift in wet-dry regime is also found over the northern part of Bangladesh under the warming world.

Keywords: Climatic change; Drought; RCM; RCP; SPI; SPEI; Multi-model ensemble (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-020-02832-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:climat:v:162:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s10584-020-02832-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-020-02832-0

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().