Abstract
In this study, precipitation, and temperature data from HadGEM2-ES under Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5 were used to evaluate drought in China in the 21st century. The K-means clustering algorithm was used to analyze the regional characteristics of the dry hazard index (DHI) in China, and the impact of climate change on the variation trend and periodicity of regional drought in China was explored. The results show that the temperature and potential evapotranspiration (PET) of all clusters have an increasing trend under the two RCPs, and the precipitation of most clusters shows a significantly increasing trend. The drought index calculated by the standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index (SPEI) is higher than those calculated by the standardized precipitation index (SPI) and standardized effective precipitation evapotranspiration index (SP*ETI). The variation trends of drought intensity and frequency in China are not significant in the 21st century; however, the local variation trends are significant. The droughts in most parts of the Xinjiang Province, northern Tibet and western Qinghai Province show significantly increasing trends. According to the DHI analyses and the variations in the drought area ratio, with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, the droughts in central and western China will become more severe, and drought will spread to the eastern areas of China. In the case that both precipitation and temperature may increase in the future, the increase in evapotranspiration caused by temperature rise will greatly affect drought dynamics. The main drought periodicity in China in the 21st century is 1~3.6 years. Drought is affected by climate change but not significantly.
Highlights
Drought is a long-term sustainable natural phenomenon with a wide spatial distribution [1], changing the flow characteristics of the underlying surface and affecting hydrological process
According to the run approach method, the duration of drought is defined as the time period when the drought indices (SPI12, SPET12 and SP*ET12) are less than −0.5
The cumulative sum of the difference between the absolute value of standardized precipitation index (SPI) and the critical value of 0.5 in the drought duration is defined as the drought intensity
Summary
Drought is a long-term sustainable natural phenomenon with a wide spatial distribution [1], changing the flow characteristics of the underlying surface and affecting hydrological process. There is an urgent need to build a reliable information system to predict the occurrence and distribution of drought, which may help to prevent and mitigate the associated disasters, and play an important role in hydrological forecast [7]. China is a country with frequent and severe drought disasters [8]. China has suffered several long-term extreme droughts, which caused huge economic losses and ecological damage [9,10,11]. From 2009 to 2010, severe drought in southwestern China affected 61.3 million people, with the area of crop failures reaching 1.1 million hectares
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