A new comprehensive approach for regional drought monitoring

Abstract

The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is a vital component of meteorological drought. Several researchers have been using SPI in their studies to develop new methodologies for drought assessment, monitoring, and forecasting. However, it is challenging for SPI to provide quick and comprehensive information about precipitation deficits and drought probability in a homogenous environment. This study proposes a Regional Intensive Continuous Drought Probability Monitoring System (RICDPMS) for obtaining quick and comprehensive information regarding the drought probability and the temporal evolution of the droughts at the regional level. The RICDPMS is based on Monte Carlo Feature Selection (MCFS), steady-state probabilities, and copulas functions. The MCFS is used for selecting more important stations for the analysis. The main purpose of employing MCFS in certain stations is to minimize the time and resources. The use of MCSF makes RICDPMS efficient for drought monitoring in the selected region. Further, the steady-state probabilities are used to calculate regional precipitation thresholds for selected drought intensities, and bivariate copulas are used for modeling complicated dependence structures as persisting between precipitation at varying time intervals. The RICDPMS is validated on the data collected from six meteorological locations (stations) of the northern area of Pakistan. It is observed that the RICDPMS can monitor the regional drought and provide a better quantitative way to analyze deficits with varying drought intensities in the region. Further, the RICDPMS may be used for drought monitoring and mitigation policies.