Abstract
This study analyzes the changes in drought patterns in China’s major crop-growing areas over the past 60 years. The analysis was done using both weather station data and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) rainfall data to calculate the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). The results showed that the occurrences of extreme drought were the most serious in recent years in the Southwest China and Sichuan crop-growing areas. The Yangtze River (MLRY) and South China crop-growing areas experienced extreme droughts during 1960–1980, whereas the Northeast China and Huang–Huai–Hai crop-growing areas experienced extreme droughts around 2003. The analysis showed that the SPIs calculated by TRMM data at time scales of one, three, and six months were reliable for monitoring drought in the study regions, but for 12 months, the SPIs calculated by gauge and TRMM data showed less consistency. The analysis of the spatial distribution of droughts over the past 15 years using TMI rainfall data revealed that more than 60% of the area experienced extreme drought in 2011 over the MLRY region and in 1998 over the Huang–Huai–Hai region. The frequency of different intensity droughts presented significant spatial heterogeneity in each crop-growing region.
Highlights
Droughts caused by long-term shortages of precipitation are a global issue
Several drought monitoring methods have been proposed and used in different areas, such as the meteorological drought composite index (CI) proposed by the China Meteorological Administration [10] and the Standardized Precipitation–Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), which combines the features of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Palmer drought index [11,12]
The precipitation increased in the 1980s, and the drought was alleviated to a certain extent
Summary
Droughts caused by long-term shortages of precipitation are a global issue. Droughts generally occur randomly, last for long periods of time, and impact large areas [1,2,3]. Drought monitoring methods based on remote sensing data, e.g., the Temperature Vegetation Drought Index (TVDI) [13,14], Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) [15], and Microwave Integrated Drought index (MIDI) [16], are mainly focused on using vegetation indices, land surface temperatures and microwave data. Hui et al evaluated drought in the Jiangsu Province by using TRMM 3B43 data [28], and Zeng et al used TRMM data to monitor drought in the Lancang River Basin [29] Such studies mainly covered individual watersheds or plains and rarely aimed at researching meteorological changes in drought across the major crop-growing areas.
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