Abstract
Drought is a slow-onset phenomenon that evolves over a season or even years. Drought affects people more than any other natural disaster due to its widespread and significant negative impacts. Population growth and associated water demand add further stress on water resources, especially in periods of drought. Drought indices represent a single value resulting from processing a considerable amount of data. These indices provide a short message to stakeholders to adapt water resource management strategies. Since drought results from interconnected phenomena, designing a composite drought index that includes several drought indices can accurately capture drought events. Drought assessment over a large-scale basin (e.g., the Blue Nile) is a challenging objective that has not been deeply tackled before except for small portions of the basin. This paper assessed droughts over the whole basin by evaluating meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological drought indices. The calculated drought indices (Standardized Runoff Index (SRI), Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), and standardized soil moisture index (SSI)) in addition to the development of a new standardized evapotranspiration index (sETI) are jointly integrated into a novel composite drought index for the Blue Nile (BNI). The optimal weights for SPI, SRI, sETI, and SSI were 0.33, 0.26, 0.2, and 0.19, respectively, in the designed BNI.
Highlights
Most human activities rely on water resources
To build a resilience plan for drought events, it is essential to comprehend the characteristics of the historical droughts of the region
The meteorological drought is quantified by the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI)
Summary
Most human activities rely on water resources. Anything changing their availability would make water resource managers concerned and could lead to instability for any community. Drought is one of the most extreme natural events that humankind draws particular attention to, especially with its complexity and vague onset. Drought is described as less-than-average available water resources in the form of precipitation, groundwater recharge, or stream runoff. Flood and hurricanes have a beginning, end, and severe impacts on infrastructures, drought is a slow-onset phenomenon that evolves over a season or even years. It affects people more than any other form of natural disaster with little impact on infrastructure [2]
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