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Abstract
Drought, which causes the economic, social, and environmental losses, also threatens food security worldwide. In this study, we developed a vegetation-soil water deficit (VSWD) method to better assess agricultural droughts. The VSWD method considers precipitation, potential evapotranspiration (PET) and soil moisture. The soil moisture from different soil layers was compared with the in situ drought indices to select the appropriate depths for calculating soil moisture during growing seasons. The VSWD method and other indices for assessing the agricultural droughts, i.e., Scaled Drought Condition Index (SDCI), Vegetation Health Index (VHI) and Temperature Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI), were compared with the in situ and multi-scales of Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEIs). The results show that the VSWD method has better performance than SDCI, VHI, and TVDI. Based on the drought events collected from field sampling, it is found that the VSWD method can better distinguish the severities of agricultural droughts than other indices mentioned here. Moreover, the performances of VSWD, SPEIs, SDCI and VHI in the major historical drought events recorded in the study area show that VSWD has generated the most sensible results than others. However, the limitation of the VSWD method is also discussed.
Highlights
Drought is considered as a devastating hazard that causes serious agricultural, ecological and socio-economic impacts worldwide [1,2,3,4]
The results demonstrate that vegetation-soil water deficit (VSWD) has clearly identified the drought events in three regions, while Vegetation Health Index (VHI) and Scaled Drought Condition Index (SDCI) have failed to do so
VSWD has identified the drought event at Liaoyuan in September 2009, its value was in a rising phase similar to SDCI and VHI but at a lower speed
Summary
Drought is considered as a devastating hazard that causes serious agricultural, ecological and socio-economic impacts worldwide [1,2,3,4]. From different points of view, droughts have been divided into four categories, i.e., meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, and social and economic drought [2,3,7,8,9]. Agricultural droughts are often associated with the shortage of precipitation and inadequate soil water supply [10,11,12,13]. It is necessary to calculate the difference between the amount of water supply and demand for drought assessment. Over the last few decades, different index methods have been developed based on the different combinations of precipitation, soil moisture, temperature, and vegetation factors, to calculate different indices and assess the agricultural drought [19,20,21,22,23]
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