Probabilistic Assessment of Global Drought Recovery and Its Response to Precipitation Changes

Abstract

AbstractAccurate assessment of drought recovery probability is crucial for proactive strategies in cost‐effective water resource allocation, resilient agriculture management, and sustainable energy planning. However, there has been a notable gap in assessing drought recovery from a probabilistic and multi‐variate perspective. Here, we develop a Vine Copula‐based framework to quantify global drought recovery probability and explore its elasticity to precipitation changes. Compared to the historical period (1951–1983), 51% of global land has become increasingly difficult to recover from extreme droughts over 1984–2016 within 8–14 days during growing seasons. Furthermore, the response of global drought recovery to precipitation changes depends on the background climate and varies asymmetrically between wet and dry conditions. Under an extremely wet climate, a 1% historical precipitation increase yields a mere 0.5% increase in global median drought recovery probability during June‐July‐August, but can lead to a pronounced 6.6% increase if climate gets extremely drier.