Drought Severity Assessment Based on Bivariate Probability Analysis

Harris Vangelis (), Mike Spiliotis () and George Tsakiris ()

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2011, vol. 25, issue 1, 357-371

Abstract: Conventionally drought severity is assessed based on drought indices. Recently the Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI) was proposed to assess drought severity based on the precipitation to potential evapotranspiration ratio (P/PET). In this paper RDI is studied as a bivariate index under a set of assumptions and simplifications. The paper presents a simple computational procedure for estimating the P/PET ratio for selected reference periods varying from 3 to 12 months, for any return period of drought. Alternatively, based on this procedure, the severity of any drought episode is rationally assessed. A bivariate probability analysis is employed based on the assumption that P and PET values are normally distributed and often negatively correlated. Examples for the application of the proposed procedure are presented using data from several meteorological stations in Greece. It is shown that the assumption of normality of both P and PET holds for long periods at all examined stations. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Keywords: Drought indices; Drought severity assessment; Reconnaissance drought index; Preparedness planning; Bivariate analysis; Drought return period (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11269-010-9704-y (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:25:y:2011:i:1:p:357-371

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-010-9704-y

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 ().