Hydrological drought early warning based on rainfall threshold

Bahram Saghafian () and Fatemeh Hamzekhani

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2015, vol. 79, issue 2, 815-832

Abstract: Hydrological drought early warning systems could greatly improve the efficiency of water resources allocation, particularly in semiarid areas where extensive storage systems are constructed. On the other hand, warning systems that rely on meteorological thresholds (triggers) are relatively easy to use in real-time conditions compared with complicated fully online forecast models. In this study, probabilistic rainfall thresholds triggering the hydrological droughts were determined on monthly basis. The case study region is Urmia Lake basin, holding one of the largest saline lakes in the world that is currently under the drying threat due to prolonged droughts and excessive surface water use. In the first step, the time series of total inflow to the Urmia Lake was transformed to a standardized hydrological drought index. A simple rainfall–drought index model was also developed at basin scale. Then, in an inverse modeling framework, rainfall threshold values causing different hydrological drought severity levels under several occurrence probabilities were determined through repetitive application of rainfall–drought index model. Derived rainfall threshold values were evaluated in a forecast mode against both historical and simulated data using the critical success index. Results revealed that the proposed approach was simple to use and sufficiently accurate in forecast of hydrological droughts, while mean probable threshold curve offered the best performance. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Drought early warning; Hydrological drought; Probability of occurrence; Rainfall threshold; Forecast; Urmia lake (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-015-1876-6 (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:nathaz:v:79:y:2015:i:2:p:815-832

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-015-1876-6

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 ().