Spatio-temporal variation of drought characteristics, water resource availability and the relation of drought with large scale climate indices: A case study of Jhelum basin, India

Abstract

With the intensification of global warming and anthropogenic activities, warming or drying episodes with respect to water deficit has brought severe challenges across the globe. It becomes imperative to understand the drought characteristics as well as water resource availability in such regions. In this paper, we employ trend analysis to investigate the tendency of Potential Evapotranspiration (PET) and Climatic Water Balance (CWB) from 1979 to 2017 in the Jhelum river basin. We applied Thornthwaite parameterization which is based on latitude and monthly mean temperature for the computation of PET. The results showed that annual PET of Srinagar and Quazigund stations has increasing tendency while annual CWB has decreasing tendency for all the selected stations in the basin. The trend test applied to monthly PET and CWB indicate that monthly PET has increasing tendency in most of the months while monthly CWB has decreasing tendency in most of the months for all the selected stations in the basin. In addition to this, the drought events were characterized using Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index (SPEI) based on 3, 6 and 12-month time scales. The SPEI was also applied to investigate the spatio-temporal characteristics of drought during the study period in the basin. The spatial patterns of drought severity were derived based on the Average Recurrence Interval (ARI). The temporal analysis revealed that an average of 65 long term, 69 intermediate term and 74 short term drought events were observed across the basin. However the spatial characteristics indicated that drought becomes more severe with long return periods in the western part of the basin. This study also investigated the influence of large scale climatic variables on 3 month SPEI over the basin using cross wavelet analysis. The results show that the drought characteristics are significantly influenced by both the ENSO and ENSO-M events throughout the Jhelum basin.