Abstract
Drought is an extreme hydrological event that causes great economic and environmental damage. Various methods are used for the identification and quantification of drought. The analysis of five drought identification methods was conducted for continental Croatia on 15 weather stations in the period from 1981 to 2011: standardised precipitation index, deciles index, percent of normal precipitation, rainfall anomaly index, and threshold level method. Results have revealed that each of these methods has its specific features but that all are applicable for the area under study. There is a significant correlation between the standard precipitation index and the deciles index, rainfall anomaly index, and percent of normal.
Highlights
The issue of frequency of droughts has been intensively studied by researches over the past two decades, as an extreme hydrological phenomenon with strong negative impacts on the economy of any area or region
The Palmer drought index [6] and the standardised precipitation index [7] are most often used in the USA, the deciles index [8] prevails in Australia, and Z-index in China [9]
The possibilities of predicting drought on the time scale from one to three months using the standardised precipitation index were analysed at five weather stations in Croatia, and it was concluded that predictions are quite accurate for one month period, while predictions over longer periods are less accurate [19]
Summary
The issue of frequency of droughts has been intensively studied by researches over the past two decades, as an extreme hydrological phenomenon with strong negative impacts on the economy of any area or region. Droughts on the Korčula Island were analysed for the period from 1948 to 2008 according to the standardised precipitation index, Palmer method, deciles index, and threshold level method [21] These examples show that the drought issue is highly complex and present in various climatic zones, and that researchers are trying to answer numerous questions about the frequency of its occurrence and quantification. Namely the standardised precipitation index, threshold level method, rainfall anomaly index, deciles index, and percent of normal precipitation or precipitation anomaly, are presented All these methods were applied for the same series of precipitation data (1981-2011), and the basic time unit was one month. The observed 31-year period is considered long enough for drought analysis purposes [8, 22]
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