Abstract
Drought is one of the most typical and serious natural disasters, which occurs frequently in most of mainland China, and it is crucial to explore the evolution characteristics of drought for developing effective schemes and strategies of drought disaster risk management. Based on the application of Cloud theory in the drought evolution research field, the cloud transformation algorithm, and the conception zooming coupling model was proposed to re-fit the distribution pattern of SPI instead of the Pearson-III distribution. Then the spatio-temporal evolution features of drought were further summarized utilizing the cloud characteristics, average, entropy, and hyper-entropy. Lastly, the application results in Northern Anhui province revealed that the drought condition was the most serious during the period from 1957 to 1970 with the SPI12 index in 49 months being less than −0.5 and 12 months with an extreme drought level. The overall drought intensity varied with the highest certainty level but lowest stability level in winter, but this was opposite in the summer. Moreover, drought hazard would be more significantly intensified along the elevation of latitude in Northern Anhui province. The overall drought hazard in Suzhou and Huaibei were the most serious, which is followed by Bozhou, Bengbu, and Fuyang. Drought intensity in Huainan was the lightest. The exploration results of drought evolution analysis were reasonable and reliable, which would supply an effective decision-making basis for establishing drought risk management strategies.
Highlights
The primary innovation of this study is to explore the spatial-temporal distribution features of drought in the Northern Anhui province from seasonal scale through re-fitting the distribution pattern of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) index via a cloud transformation algorithm instead of Pearson-III distribution
The purpose of this study is to explore the spatial-temporal distribution features of drought in the Northern Anhui province from both yearly and seasonal scales
(2) During the period from 1957 to 2010, the evolution trend of drought intensity varied with the highest certainty level but lowest stability level in the winter, but this was exactly opposite of that in the summer
Summary
The Northern Anhui province is mainly plain with a total area of. The Northern Anhui province is located in the transition zone between the north subtropical humid climate and half of the moist monsoon climate. The annual average precipitation during the flood season from June to September accounts for 70% to the total mainly with the form of rainstorm, which is beneficial for the occurrence of waterlogging in the flood season and drought in the non-flood season. Water shortage is serious in the North Anhui province with the annual average water resources availability of 12.87 billion m3 , which is half of the provincial level and even below 0.75 of the average national level. Compared with the surface water resources availability, the ground water resources are abundant, and the ratio for surface and ground water resources is approaching 1: 1 in the North
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