A New Standardized Type Drought Indicators Based Hybrid Procedure for Strengthening Drought Monitoring System

Abstract

Drought is occurring recurrently in various climatic zones around the world. Therefore, accurate and continuous drought monitoring are essential for reliable drought mitigation policies. In past research, several drought monitoring indicators have been developed. Regardless of their scopes and applicabilities, every indicator has certain amount of error regarding accurate determination of drought classes. In addition, climate change and complex features of meteorological variables also reduce the performance of each indicator. Consequently, accurate drought monitoring is a challenging task in hydrology and water management research. The objective of this research is to enhance the accuracies in drought characterization by employing multiple drought indicators, simultaneously. This article proposes a new aggregative index – the Seasonal Mixture Standardized Drought Index (SMSDI). The procedure of SMSDI is mainly based on the integration of Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and K-Component Gaussian Mixture Distribution (K-CGMD). In preliminary analysis, aggregation of three multi-scalar Standardized Drought Indices (SDIs) is made for three meteorological gauge stations of Pakistan. For comparative assessment, individual SDI has used to investigate the association and consistency with SMSDI. Outcome associated with this research shows that the SMSDI have significant correlation with individual SDIs. We conclude that instead of using individual indicator, the proposed aggregative approach enhances the scope and capacity of drought indicators for extracting reliable information related to future drought.