Abstract
Drought is a worldwide natural disaster with a wide range of influences and a long duration, which has a huge impact on the agricultural production activities and social economy of local residents. The Belt and Road Initiative has always received much attention due to its special geographical location and great potential for economic development. At the same time, the Belt and Road region is also deeply affected by drought, especially in some countries and regions, where the agricultural infrastructure is weak and the ecological environment is fragile. How to effectively monitor and evaluate drought has become an urgent problem to be solved. In this study, the ERA5 atmospheric reanalysis data were used, and the self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index was combined with Breaks for Additive Seasonal and Trend (BFAST) to study the temporal and spatial distribution of the 1989–2017 monthly scale of drought in different climate regions of the Belt and Road region. The results show that the overall change trend of arid area shows a change of “up-down-up-down.” The winter drought area is larger than the summer drought area, and the drought center gradually moves from the Southeast Asia region in winter to the West–Central Asia region in summer. In the past five years, the drought area decreased gradually at the rate of approximately 0.38 million km2 per year.
Highlights
Drought is an unusually dry incident over a period, causing water shortages for long enough to cause severe hydrological imbalances in the affected areas [1]. e imbalance of water budget is caused by the combined effects of climatic conditions, underlying surface, and human activities
In order to study the variation of drought under different climate regions better, according to the Wladimir Koppen climate zone classification [46], we divided the whole region into equatorial, arid, warm, snow, and polar. e climate classification system was proposed by a German climatologist Wladimir Koppen
From 1999 to the present, the trend of drought change basically accords with the change every five years. It can be seen from the periodic component that the drought area in the whole region of Belt and Road reaches the maximum in winter and spring and is lower in summer and autumn. e trend component Tt indicates that there are four arid climate change points from 1989 to 2017 and five periods of different periods of drought. e linear fitting of the monthly area change line of the five-stage drought period was obtained, and the slopes of the five-stage trend were 0.000191, 0.0053, − 0.00513, 0.0034, and − 0.00439
Summary
Drought is an unusually dry incident over a period, causing water shortages for long enough to cause severe hydrological imbalances in the affected areas [1]. e imbalance of water budget is caused by the combined effects of climatic conditions, underlying surface, and human activities. Drought is an unusually dry incident over a period, causing water shortages for long enough to cause severe hydrological imbalances in the affected areas [1]. E imbalance of water budget is caused by the combined effects of climatic conditions, underlying surface, and human activities. Hurricanes, and other disasters, the process of drought is much slower [2, 3]. It usually takes several months or even several seasons [4]. Once it becomes a disaster, it has a large scope and lasts for a long time [5]. Drought-related disasters in the 1980s caused more than half a million deaths in Africa [7]
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