Estimation of Drought Intensities over States of India

Abstract

In peninsular India, droughts are often observed as recurring events. They have interrelated impacts on the socio-political, socio-economic, and environmental conditions. The consequences of droughts are population shifts, alteration of the social structure, vast economic hardship, and notable environmental franticness. Most common drought impacts are degradation of farmland, significant increase in wind erosion, downfall in natural flora and fauna, spoliation of air quality, pest infestations, and stressed water supply. As tremendous economic, environmental and social impacts are associated with droughts, it becomes very important to have an early warning system, which can warn the local administration to take necessary strides ahead of time to tackle such circumstances.
The main purpose of this study is to propose a best way to estimate drought conditions in the states of India, which has faced serious water shortages in the past. This work presents innovative drought modelling procedures by taking into consideration the inherent uncertainty feature in drought evolution. To account objectively for the uncertainty: Time series trend analysis and probabilistic statistical methodologies were considered with a set of simplifying assumptions. The necessary formulations and their quantitative applications through numerical solution approaches were presented for identifying critical drought areas. Drought indices like normalized deviation, dryness index, standardized precipitation index (SPI) and Bhalme and Mooley index (BMI) should be applied on the meteorological data to quantify droughts. The results obtained from Probabilistic statistical analysis and drought indices then should be compared. The methodology considered results in explaining variation in the drought severity across the regions.
This work provides concrete solutions for designing an early warning system for drought prediction, as it is now known that which station is to be monitored while dealing with a particular region.