Future projection of droughts over major river basins in Southern Africa at specific global warming levels

Abstract

Reliable drought projections are crucial for the effective managements of future drought risk. Most of the existing drought projections over Southern Africa are based on precipitation alone, neglecting the influence of potential evapotranspiration (PET). The present study shows that inclusion of PET may alter the magnitude and robustness of the drought projections. The study used two drought indices to project potential impacts of global warming on Southern African droughts, focusing on four major river basins. One of the drought indices (SPEI: Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index) is obtained from climate water balance (i.e. precipitation minus potential evapotranspiration) while the other (SPI: Standardized Precipitation Index) is calculated from precipitation alone. For the projections, we analyzed multi-model regional climate simulations from the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) at four specific global warming levels (GWLs) (i.e., 1.5 °C, 2.0 °C, 2.5 °C, and 3.0 °C) above the pre-industrial level and used the self-organizing maps to classify the drought projections into groups based on their similarities. Our results show that the CORDEX simulations give a realistic representation of all the necessary climate variables for quantifying droughts over Southern Africa. The simulations project a robust increase in SPEI drought intensity and frequency over Southern Africa and indicate that the magnitude of the projection increases with increasing GWLs, especially over the various river basins. In contrast, they project a non-significant change in SPI droughts at all the GWLs. The majority of the simulations clearly distinguish between the projected SPEI and SPI drought patterns, and the distinction becomes clearer with increasing GWLs. Hence, using precipitation alone for drought projection over Southern Africa may underestimate the magnitude and robustness of the projections. This study has application in mitigating climate change impacts on drought risk over Southern African river basins in the future.