Spatio-temporal variation of drought in China during 1961-2012: A climatic perspective

Understanding the spatial and temporal variation of drought is essentially important in drought assessment. In most previous studies, drought event is usually identified in space and time separately, ignoring the nature of the dynamic processes. In order to better understand how drought changes have taken place in China during the past half-century, we carried out a comprehensive analysis of their spatio-temporal variation based on multiple drought indices from a climatic perspective. A 3-dimensional clustering method is developed to identify drought events in China from 1961 to 2012 based on the 0.25 degrees gridded indices of SPI3 (3 months Standardized Precipitation Index), RDI3 (3 months Reconnaissance Drought Index) and SPEI3 (3 months Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index). Drought events are further characterized by five parameters: duration, affected area, severity, intensity, and centroid. Remotely sensed soil moisture data were used to validate the rationality of identified drought events. The results show that the two most severe drought events in the past half century which occurred in the periods 1962-1963 and 2010-2011 swept more than half of the non-arid regions in China. Large magnitude droughts were usually centered in the region from North China Plain to the downstream of Yangtze River. The western part of North China Plain, Loess Plateau, Sichuan Basin and Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau had a significant drying trend, which is mainly caused by the significant decrease of precipitation. The three drought indices have almost the same performance in the humid regions, while SPI and RDI were found to be more appropriate than SPEI in the arid regions. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.