Observed trends in timing and severity of streamflow droughts across global tropics

Abstract

Drought is a recurrent climatic hazard impacting natural and built environmental systems, including human lives. Although several studies have assessed streamflow droughts and their multivariate characterization, very few studies have focused on understanding spatiotemporal changes in drought attributes, such as drought seasonality, severity and duration across global tropics. Further, the nonlinear response between onset time and severity of streamflow droughts at a large scale are unknown. Leveraging ground-based streamflow observations, this study for the first time investigate changes in streamflow drought characteristics across global tropics using two 30 year climate normal periods: 1961–1990 and 1991–2020. Our analyses of changes in probability distributions of onset time and severity (deficit volume) of streamflow droughts over the two time windows show significant shifts towards higher values for Northeast and South American Monsoon region, Western Africa, eastern South Africa, north and eastern Australia. Around 55% of the sites show an increase in drought frequency in recent times. We found that in the recent times, only 27% of sites depict an increase in deficit volume accompanied by delayed onset. Further, we identify a few regional hotspots, such as Northeast and South American monsoon region, and eastern coast of Australia show an increased frequency of droughts with an upward trend in deficit volume in recent years. As expected, the individual changes in drought attributes have translated into changes in joint occurrences of their interdependent attributes, assuming the correlation between onset time and deficit volume. Our analyses show robust dependence strengths between onset time and deficit volume, which strengthen further in the recent time window over 50% of catchments. The nonstationary changes identified here in individual drought attributes and their joint dependence can alter the hazard potential of extreme droughts, which has consequences in risk management, climate adaptation and water resources planning.