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Assessment of Agricultural Drought Vulnerability in the Guanzhong Plain, China

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Abstract

The Guanzhong Plain, as an important traditional agricultural area, is suffering from high frequency droughts and a trend towards more serious drought. In this paper, eight factors, precipitation, evapotranspiration, surface water availability, depth to groundwater, well yield capacity, slope, potential water storage of soil, and GDP from agriculture, are integrated into an index to represent drought vulnerability based on the overlay and index method. In this approach, according to the internal connections between factors, precipitation and evapotranspiration are integrated into the moisture index, and depth to groundwater and well yield capacity are integrated into groundwater availability. To improve the rationality and accuracy, normalization is employed to assign rating values, and the analytic hierarchy process is introduced into the weighting scheme. Two local drought monitoring datasets endorses the results of the model. The map removal sensitivity analysis indicates the vulnerability index has low sensitivity in removing each layer. The single-parameter sensitivity analysis indicates the major contribution to the vulnerability index is meteorology followed by groundwater availability and surface water availability. The vulnerability map shows the low vulnerability coincides roughly with irrigation districts on the terraces and floodplains. The northwest tableland generally has moderate vulnerability, due largely to inefficient groundwater withdrawal. The high vulnerability is concentrated at the peripheries of the plain, where agriculture is generally rain-fed without irrigation and groundwater support, and land is rugged with high slopes.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the Special Fund for Scientific Research on Public Interest of the Ministry of Water Resources (201301084), the Foundation for the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of Chang’an University (310829165005, 310829150002). The mean annual precipitation, moisture index, soil texture and GDP from agriculture were obtained from Data Center for Resources and Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences (http://www.resdc.cn). The monthly precipitation used for SPI was obtained from China Meteorological Data Service Center (http://data.cma.cn/en). The ASTER GDEM was obtained from Geospatial Data Cloud (http://www.gscloud.cn/). The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments that greatly improved the quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Chang’an University, Xi’an, China

    Hao Wu, Hui Qian, Jie Chen & Chenchen Huo

  2. Key Laboratory of Subsurface Hydrology and Ecological Effect in Arid Region of Ministry of Education, Chang’an University, Xi’an, China

    Hao Wu, Hui Qian, Jie Chen & Chenchen Huo

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  1. Hao Wu
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Wu, H., Qian, H., Chen, J. et al. Assessment of Agricultural Drought Vulnerability in the Guanzhong Plain, China. Water Resour Manage 31, 1557–1574 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-017-1594-9

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