Abstract
This paper aims to improve the predictability of extreme droughts in China by identifying their relationship with atmospheric teleconnection patterns (ATPs). Firstly, a core drought region (CDR) is defined based on historical drought analysis to investigate possible prediction methods. Through the investigation of the spatial-temporal characteristics of spring drought using a modified Mann–Kendall test, the CDR is found to be under a decadal drying trend. Using principal component analysis, four principal components (PCs), which explain 97% of the total variance, are chosen out of eight teleconnection indices. The tree-based model reveals that PC1 and PC2 can be divided into three groups, in which extreme spring drought (ESD) frequency differs significantly. The results of Poisson regression on ESD and PCs showed good predictive performance with R-squared value larger than 0.8. Furthermore, the results of applying the neural networks for PCs showed a significant improvement in the issue of under-estimation of the upper quartile group in ESD, with a high coefficient of determination of 0.91. This study identified PCs of large-scale ATPs that are candidate parameters for ESD prediction in the CDR. We expect that our findings can be helpful in undertaking mitigation measures for ESD in China.
Highlights
Under global warming, the occurrence of extreme climate disasters is predicted to become more frequent, with droughts being one of the most severe disasters [1,2,3,4]
The range of latitude in the lower figures corresponds to extreme drought region in the upper figure, and the range of longitude accords with the upper map, the y-axis of lower figures ranges from 850 mb to 250 mb
A smaller area around the lower the Yangtze river basin suffers trend of spring precipitation, a smaller area around thereach lowerofreach of the Yangtze river basinmore suffers frequent extreme spring drought (ESD), where 43 (33%) and 24 (19%) stations in core drought region (CDR) show an increase in ESD frequency at more frequent ESD, where 43 (33%) and 24 (19%) stations in CDR show an increase in ESD frequency
Summary
The occurrence of extreme climate disasters is predicted to become more frequent, with droughts being one of the most severe disasters [1,2,3,4]. 6–8 billion dollars in damages globally, and people who are affected by droughts suffer far more damage than other natural disasters. Significant economic and societal losses have been incurred due to persistent severe droughts in 1997 and from 1999 to 2002 in northern China [2]. In 2000, droughts affected more than 40 million hectares’ agricultural areas [5]. The spring drought in 2011 over southern China has received much attention [6,8,9], as it resulted in more than 1.09 billion dollars in economic losses solely in Hubei
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