Assessment and monitoring of drought in Chitradurga district of Karnataka using different drought indices

S. Sridhara S. SRIDHARA,Pradeep Gopakkali PRADEEP GOPAKKALI,G.m. Chaithra G.M. CHAITHRA

doi:10.54386/jam.v23i2.72

S. Sridhara S. SRIDHARA, Pradeep Gopakkali PRADEEP GOPAKKALI + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.54386/jam.v23i2.72

Copy DOI

Abstract

 Drought is a natural disaster due to less precipitation than the normal that can occur irrespective of climate regimes. Impact assessment of drought and monitoring are the most important mitigation stratregies to combat the drought effects. As the single index cannot assess all the drought conditions, in the present study multi-variate indices approach has been used to assess and monitor drought. Five indices were assessed using precipitation data such as deciles index (DI), percent normal (PN), China-Z index (CZI), Z-Score index (ZSI) and standardized precipitation index (SPI). Monthly total precipitation data was used to calculate drought events occurred during the period 1967–2017 in different talukas of Chitradurga district of Karnataka, India. The assessment revealed that SPI, CZI and ZSI performance was similar in identifying drought. PN was very much responsive for the rainfall events that occurred during the particular year however, it exhibited variations in dry conditions. DI was not that much satisfactory in identifying drought conditions. Among the five indices assessed, SPI seems to be the best indicator to predict the drought onset than the other four drought indices. Therefore SPI can be recommended for assessing and monitoring the drought in Chitradurga district of Karnataka, India.

Highlights

Deficit of rainfall for prolonged period affecting human life, water resources and economy of the country to an huge extent is referred as meteorological drought
Comparison of seven different drought indices such as deciles index (DI), standardized precipitation index (SPI), percent normal (PN), Z-Score index (ZSI), Modified China Z-Index (MCZI), China-Z index (CZI) and Effective Drought Index (EDI) was made by Morid et al (2006) for monitoring the drought which revealed that DI performance depends on rainfall events whereas EDI on drought intensity
To reduce the variation in the data set, Modified China Z-Index (MCZI) was proposed by Wu et al (2001) wherein, mean precipitation was replaced by median precipitation in CZI equation

Summary

Introduction

Deficit of rainfall for prolonged period affecting human life, water resources and economy of the country to an huge extent is referred as meteorological drought. As SPI performs well under varied climatic conditions and at different time scales, it can be widely adapted to assess drought intensity on a global scale including India. Similar kind of comparsion among six different drought indices (SPI, CZI, MCZI, de Martonne aridity index, PN and ZSI) was made under six varied climatic regions in Iran by Shahabfar and Eitzinger (2013) and they could conclude from the study that out of six indices, CZI, MCZI and ZSI performed well in predicting meteorological drought. Jain et al (2015) reported that EDI is the best drought indicator for different climate regimes of Central India like temperate, semi-arid, dry and sub-humid regions. Based on the findings and research ideas of earlier scientists, the current study of drought assessment has been taken using five different drought indices in Chitradurga district to find out the best drought indicator for monitoring and mitigating the drought

Methods

Results

Conclusion