Hydrological Drought Index Based on Discharge

Abstract

Drought is a natural phenomenon causing disasters and its period of occurrence can be predicted in recent times based on several methods using the same or different variables. The prediction is usually associated with the climate interactions in the form of rainfall or discharge patterns which can be analyzed using the return period. There- fore, this research was conducted in four different stages of data acquisition and vali- dation, drought analysis method based on the data, drought prediction method based on hydrology, and sample applications to determine the debit availability in other water- sheds. Historical rainfall data converted to dependable rainfall at 80% probability were used as input for the rainfall-discharge analysis while the hydrological drought analysis was conducted using the drought threshold value. Moreover, the drought was predicted using an artificial neural network model while historical data were used to verify the hydrological character of the prediction model. The results of the analysis conducted were further used to predict the water balance in different river areas due to the fact that each area has a different hydrological character. Meanwhile, the watersheds used as case research showed that the model has reliability of up to 80%. Keywords: