Assessing the suitability of McKee et al. (1993) drought severity classification across India

Siddhant Panigrahi () and Vikas Kumar Vidyarthi
Additional contact information
Siddhant Panigrahi: National Institute of Technology
Vikas Kumar Vidyarthi: National Institute of Technology

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2024, vol. 120, issue 14, No 40, 13543-13572

Abstract: Abstract Drought analysis has become very important in water resources management and has brought attention to many researchers in recent years owing to its severity which leads to economic and life-threatening impacts in the affected region. Many studies have been carried out across different domains of drought at regional and global scales using various drought indices. Drought indices such as SPI, RDI, and SPEI have been widely used for meteorological drought assessment across the globe but their differences in terms of classification of drought severity are yet to be assessed. Currently, the classification table given by McKee et al. (Proceedings of the 8th conference on applied climatology, 1993) is being used for finding the severity of meteorological drought conditions irrespective of the index being used. However, all these indices differ in data requirements, and their formulations. This study focuses on assessing the suitability of McKee et al. (1993) drought severity classification for the two most popular meteorological drought indices, namely, SPI and SPEI across 36 meteorological subdivisions within India having varied climatic conditions. For this purpose, the SPI and SPEI are calculated for varying assessment periods of 3, 6, 9, 12 and 24 months for all these subdivisions employing the precipitation and temperature data obtained from the Indian Meteorological Department, Pune. In the next step, the meteorological subdivisions with the maximum and minimum number of extreme drought and extreme wet events across different assessment periods have been identified for these indices. The coefficient of determination (R2 Value) between SPI and SPEI has been estimated for all the meteorological subdivisions and is found to be maximum at 0.98 for Assam & Meghalaya and minimum at 0.40 for Saurashtra & Rann of Kutch and Gujarat. Further Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) has been estimated for all the meteorological subdivisions and is found to be maximum at 0.73 for West Bengal & Sikkim and minimum at 0.32 for West Rajasthan. The analysis based on R2 and MCC shows that the meteorological subdivisions in hot desert and arid climate, and steppe hot and arid climate, have low agreement among SPI and SPEI. The disparity between SPI and SPEI drought severity is quite evident for Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Maharashtra, Vidarbha, Marathwada, Rayalseema, and West Madhya Pradesh subdivisions, where effect of high temperature is an influential factor in determining the climate of these regions. The overall conclusion drawn from this study is that the use of McKee et al. (1993) drought severity classification table for drought indices other than SPI is not always advisable and opens a discussion for the requirement of separate drought classification tables for different indices for getting better assessment of drought in a specific climatic region.

Keywords: Standardized precipitation index (SPI); Standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI); Reconnaissance drought index (RDI); Drought severity classification; McKee et al. (1993) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11069-024-06762-3 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:nathaz:v:120:y:2024:i:14:d:10.1007_s11069-024-06762-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-024-06762-3

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().