Abstract
Abstract The present study aimed to quantify the impacts of the meteorological drought on the production of maize crops, using district-level observed precipitation and yield data of 21 districts across Punjab, Pakistan from 2001 to 2020. The overall analysis showed that the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) effectively reflects the variations in drought characteristics in Punjab on spatiotemporal scales. It also resulted that in south Punjab, the maize yield was negatively affected by the meteorological drought, and yield was sensitive to short-term (1 and 3 months) drought during the critical growth period of the crop. The overall analysis depicted that the meteorological drought was associated with about 27% of overall yield variations. Moreover, all of the southern districts and few districts from Central Punjab were becoming increasingly sensitive to meteorological drought where significant spatial variations in drought effects and sensitivity exist over time. Conclusively, this study showed a spatiotemporal pattern of drought and its impact on maize yield, indicating that the districts where variability in maize production was significantly associated with drought and recommend adoption of the management strategies and mitigation measures.
Highlights
The agriculture system is very responsive and sensitive to the fluctuation in rainfall patterns, and due to its dependency on water, it is the extremely affected sector by extreme events like droughts (UNISDR 2009)
The analysis showed that coefficient of variation (CV) has a lower value in the districts with higher productivity and increasing yielding trends, and a higher value of CV in the districts having low yield with mild increasing yield trends
This study resulted that meteorological drought has been associated with Punjab maize yield variability with an average of 27% over the past two decades (2001–2020), and short-term droughts (i.e., 1 and 3 months) during the critical growth stage of the crop cycle were more correlated with yield variations having a higher value of R2
Summary
The agriculture system is very responsive and sensitive to the fluctuation in rainfall patterns, and due to its dependency on water, it is the extremely affected sector by extreme events like droughts (UNISDR 2009). Considering the hydrological cycle, drought is classified into different four classes, i.e., meteorological drought, hydrological drought, and agricultural and socio-economic drought (Waseem et al 2020). Among these different types of droughts, meteorological drought is the most important form of drought as surface water resources, and most importantly, the agriculture of a country is heavily dependent on meteorological information. It is mainly as meteorological drought can cause a significant reduction in agriculture yield especially in the arid region of a country
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