Abstract
AbstractLarge communities of people worldwide are affected by droughts, causing major economic losses, environmental harm, and social deprivation. The characteristics of the drought are hard to define, detect and monitor. Drought events are quantified by several indices when there is no real ground-level assessment system available. The drought indexes such as Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Statistical Z score (SZs) and China-Z Index (CZI) that can provide a direct, simple and quantitative evaluation of the key characteristics of intensity, duration of drought, and spatial extent. This article analyzes the SPI, statistical Z score and CZI on different time scales such as annual and seasonal (North–East, South–West Winter and Summer) by taking Tiruchirapalli as a study area using 25 years (1981–2005) of monthly rainfall data. In this analysis, the implementation of each index is compared and the study results suggest that the CZI and SZs can provide similar results and shows the minor deviation to the SPI for all time scales, and that the CZI and SZs computations are comparatively easy compared to the SPI.KeywordsRainfallDroughtSPIChina-Z indexStatistical Z score
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