Abstract
This study has investigated the spatio-temporal changes of droughts from 1961 to 2005 in the Wei River Basin. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was employed to describe the droughts. The trends of SPI value at all the meteorological stations were calculated by using the modified Mann-Kendall (MMK) trend test method, indicating that the western basin has a significantly wet trend, whilst the eastern basin including the Guanzhong Plain has a trend towards drought . Since the historical droughts records were too short to fully investigate drought properties in this basin, a practical nonparametric method was proposed to calculate the joint probability distribution of drought properties, which overcomes the shortcomings of the univariate and parametric frequency analysis. The frequency analysis of drought in the Wei River Basin indicates that the Guanzhong Plain and the surrounding areas of Huanxian meteorological station have a high drought risks, whilst the western and northern basin except the surrounding areas of Huanxian station has a relatively low drought risk.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adamowski K (1996) Nonparametric estimation of low-flow frequencies. J Hydraul Eng 122(1):46–49
Chow VT, Maidment DR, Mays LW (1988) Applied hydrology. McGraw-Hill, New York
Daufresne M, Lengfellner K, Sommer U (2009) Global warming benefits the small in aquatic ecosystems. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106(31):12788–12793
Davar K, Tohid F et al (2011) Comparability analyses of the SPI and RDI meteorological drought indices in different climatic zones. Water Resour Manag 25(6):1737–1757
Eagleson PS (1972) Dynamics of flood frequency. Water Resour Res 8(4):879–898
Fadhilah Y, Foo HM et al (2013) Characterisation of drought properties with bivariate copula analysis. Water Resour Manag 27(12):4183–4207
Francesco S, Brunella B et al (2009) Probabilistic characterization of drought properties through copulas. Phys Chem Earth 34:596–605
Hamed KH, Rao AR (1998) A modified Mann–Kendall trend test for autocorrelated data. J Hydrol 204:182–196
Harrell FE, Davis CE (1982) A new distribution free quantile estimator. Biometrika 693:635–640
Kao SC, Govindaraju RS (2010) A copula-based joint deficit index for droughts. J Hydrol 380:121–134
Kao SC, Rao SG (2010) A copula-based joint deficit index for droughts. J Hydrol 380: 121–134
Kendall MG (1955) Rank correlation methods. Griffin, London
Kim TW, Valdés JB, Yoo C (2003) Nonparametric approach for estimating return periods of droughts in arid regions. Journal of Hyrologic Engineering 8:237–246
Kim TW, Valdés JB et al (2006) Nonparametric approach for bivariate drought characterization using palmer drought index. J Hydrol Eng 11:134–143
Lall U (1995) Recent advance in nonparametric function estimation, hydrologic application. Rev Geophys 33(S1):1093–1102
Lall U, Rajagopalan B, Tarboton DG (1996) A nonparametric wet/dry spell model for resampling daily precipitation. Water Resour Res 32(9):2803–2823
Logan KE, Brunsell NA, Jones AR, Feddema JJ (2010) Assessing spatiotemporal variability of drought in the U.S. central plains. J Arid Environ 74:247–255
Ma MW, Song SB, Yu Y et al (2012) Multivariate joint probability distribution of droughts in Wei River basin. Journal of Hydroelctric Engineering 31(6):28–34 (In Chinese)
Mann HB (1945) Nonparametric tests against trend. Econometrica 13:245–259
Mathier L, Perreault L, Bobe B, Ashkar F (1992) The use of geometric and gamma-related distributions for frequency analysis of water deficit. Stochastic Hydrology Hydraulic 6(4):239–254
McKee TB, Doesken NJ, Kleist J (1993) The relationship of drought frequency and duration to time scales, Preprints Eighth Conference on Applied Climatology, American Meteorological Society, Anaheim, CA, pp. 179–184
Mitchell JM, Dzerdzeevskii B, Flohn H (1966) Climate change, WHO technical note 79. World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, p 79
Moon YI, Lall U (1994) Kernel quantile function estimator for flood frequency analysis. Water Resour Res 30(11):3095–3103
Sadri S, Burn DH (2012) Nonparametric methods for drought severity estimation at ungauged sites. Water Resour Res 48, W12505
Salas JD, Fu C, Cancelliere A, Dustin D, Bode D, Pineda A, Vincent E (2005) Characterizing the severity and risk of drought in the Poudre River, Colorado, Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management. ASCE 131(5):383–393
Sen Z (1976) Wet and dry periods of annual flows series. J Hydraul Div 102(10):1503–1514
Sharma A (2000) Seasonal to interseasonal rainfall probabilistic forecasts for improved water supply management: part 3-A nonparametric probabilistic forecast model. J Hydrol 239:249–258
Shiau JT, Shen HW (2001) Recurrence analysis of hydrologic droughts of differing severity. J Water Resour Plan Manag 127(1):30–40
Silverman BW (1986) Density estimation for statistics and data analysis. Chapman & Hall, London
Tayeb R, Isabella B et al (2013) Regional drought modes in iran using the SPI: the effect of time scale and spatial resolution. Water Resour Manag 27(6):1661–1674
Tsakiris G, Spiliotis M (2011) Planning against long term water scarcity: a fuzzy multicriteria approach. Water Resour Manag 25(4):1103–1129
Tsakiris G, Nalbantis I et al (2013) A system-based paradigm of drought analysis for operational management. Water Resour Manag 27(15):5281–5297
Wilhite DA (1993) Drought assessment, management and planning: theory and case studies. Kluwer Academic Publishers, USA, 293 pp
Wilhite DA (2000) Drought as a natural hazard: concepts and definitions. In: Wilhite D (ed) Drought: A Global Assessment, Vol. 1. Routledge, London & New York, pp. 3–18
Willems P (2000) Compound intensity/duration/frequencyrelationships of extreme precipitation for two seasons and two storm types. J Hydrol 233:189–205
World Meteorological Organization (WMO) (1997) Climate, drought and desertification. Geneva, WMO No. 869, 12 p
Yevjevich V (1967) Objective approach to definitions and investigations of continental hydrologic droughts, hydrology Paper 23, Colorado State U, Fort Collins, August 1967, 19 p, 9 fig, 1 tab, 12 ref.
Yoo J, Kwon HH et al (2012) Drought frequency analysis using cluster analysis and bivariate probability distribution. J Hydrol 420–421:102–111
Zeyad S, Tarawneh EAE et al (2009) Bi-site analysis of meteorological drought duration: theoretical modeling and application. Water Resour Manag 23(14):3005–3018
Zhang L, Singh Vijay P (2007) Bivariate rainfall frequency distributions using Archimedean copulas. J Hydrol 332:93–109
Zhang H, Chen Y, Ren G, Yang G (2008) The characteristics of precipitation variation of Weihe River Basin in Shaanxi Province during recent 50 years. Agricultural Research in the Arid Areas 26(4):236–242
Zhang Q, Singh VP, Peng JT et al (2012a) Spatial-temporal changes of precipitation structure across the Pearl River basin. China, Journal of Hydrology 440–441:113–122
Zhang Q, Xiao MZ, Singh VP et al (2012b) Regionalization and spatial changing properties of droughts across the Pearl River basin. China, Journal of Hydrology 472–473:355–366
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Major Fundamental Research Program (2011CB403306), the Natural Science Foundation of China (51179148, 51179149, 51309098), the Ministry of Education in the new century talents program (NCET-10-0933) and the Ministry of Water Resources Public Welfare Fund Industry (201101043, 201301039). Sincere gratitude is extended to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their professional comments and corrections, which greatly improved the presentation of the paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Huang, S., Chang, J., Huang, Q. et al. Spatio-temporal Changes and Frequency Analysis of Drought in the Wei River Basin, China. Water Resour Manage 28, 3095–3110 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-014-0657-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-014-0657-4