Evaluation of the meteorological drought over the Bundelkhand region using geo-spatial techniques (original) (raw)

Citation Kundu A, Denis DM, Patel NR. Evaluation of the meteorological drought over the Bundelkhand region using geo-spatial techniques. ABSTRACT: Drought is a climate based natural hazard occurs in almost all climatic zones irrespective of high or low rainfall areas. Generally, drought is considered as a dry weather condition that lasts over several weeks to months, with no or little rainfall. It happens due to imbalance in water availability. There are several types of drought that can be defined from various perspectives such as agricultural, hydrological, meteorological and socio-economical. Meteorological drought generally defined as a condition, where the annual precipitation is less than the normal for a prolonged period (month, season or year) over an area. Among the several proposed meteorological drought indices, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is a popular drought index, solely based on precipitation and it measures how much precipitation for a given period of time has deviated from historically observed precipitation of an area. Technically, SPI represents the number of standard deviation of the observed value deviated from the long-term mean, for a normally distributed random variable i.e. Z-variate. SPI can estimate the drought features with different time scales (1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 24 and 48 months), it has been broadly applied to analyze different aspects of droughts. Normally, the ''drought'' part of the SPI range is arbitrary split into moderately dry (-1.0 > SPI >-1.49), severely dry (-1.5 > SPI >-1.99) and extremely dry conditions (SPI <-2.0). The present study attempts to assess the meteorological drought response to extreme climate condition. Long-term rainfall data (2002-2013) have been taken for Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) analysis. A detailed spatio-temporal analysis of drought dynamics was carried out using the SPI, which revealed the occurrence of a severe drought in Bundelkhand region during several years.