Drought modelling under climate change scenarios and its probabilistic characterization: A Review

Abstract

ncrease in the water scarcity and the related rise in demand of water coupled with the threating events of climate change, ultimately witnessed drought in the recent years to occur frequently. Therefore, Drought hydrology is drawing most of the attention. Drought which is a natural hazard can be best characterized by various hydrological and climatological parameters. In order to model drought, researchers have applied various concepts starting from simplistic model to the complex ones. The suitability of different modelling approaches and their negative and positive traits are very essential to comprehend. This paper is an attempt to review various methodologies utilized in modelling of drought such as forecasting of drought, drought modelling based on probability, Global Climate Models (GCM) under climate change scenarios. It is obtained from the present study that the past three decades have witnessed a very significant improvement in the drought modelling studies. For the larger time window of drought forecasting, hybrid models which incorporates large scale climate indices are promisingly suitable. Drought characterization based on copula models for multivariate drought characterization seems to have an edge over the others. At the end some conclusive remarks are made as far as the future drought modelling and research is concerned.