Drought Analysis of Haihe Basin in North China based on the Community Land Model, 1960-2010

Abstract:

Drought severity not only depends on weather anomaly, but is also related to terrestrial hydrological condition to a large extent. In this study, we analyzed droughts using indices based on precipitation and soil moisture during the period of 1960-2010 in Haihe basin, which is a typical drought-prone region in North China. The Soil Moisture Drought Severity (SMDS) and Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) are used to evaluate drought severity. SMDS is calculated based on the monthly soil moisture of upper 50cm from the simulation by Community Land Model (CLM 4.0) and SPI is calculated based on gridded precipitation at 0.05° resolution (5 km × 5 km approximately), which is spatially interpolated from observations. During the last 51 years, 36 severe drought events (affecting areas greater than 20,000 km2 and durations longer than 3 months) have been identified based on SMDS, and 41 drought events identified based on SPI. Results derived from SMDS indicate that there is a significant increasing trend in the drought affected area, and that the drought event occurred in 1999 has the largest affected area. Compared with the drought events derived from SMDS, the events derived from SPI have shorter durations but larger affected areas on average. Although the mean NDVI of the whole basin has been increasing since the 1980s, the two declining periods of 1992-1994 and 1999-2003 show fairly good agreement with the drought events identified in the same periods. Comparison between SMDS and SPI shows the superiority of SMDS for drought assessment in the perspective of terrestrial ecosystem.

Keywords:

Drought analysis; Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI); Soil Moisture Drought Severity (SMDS); Community Land Model; Haihe basin

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