干旱频率和持续时间与时间尺度的关系

1.0 简介

The definition of drought has continually been a stumbling block for drought monitoring and analysis.

Wilhite and Glantz (1985) completed a thorough review of dozens of drought definitions and identified six overall categories: meteorological, climatological, atmospheric, agricultural, hydrologic and water management. Dracup et al (1980) also reviewed definitions. All points of view seem to agree that drought is a condition of insufficient moisture caused by a deficit in precipitation over some time period.

Difficulties are primarily related to the time period over which deficits accumulate and to the connection of the deficit in precipitation to deficits in usable water sources and the impacts that ensue.

Usable water sources include soil moisture, ground water, snowpack, streamflow and reservoir storage. Any impacts of drought associated with water demand exceeding water supply originate with one or more of these five usable supplies. The time period from the arrival of precipitation until water is available in each useable form differs greatly. Water uses also have characteristic time scales. Consequently, the impacts of a water deficit are a complex function of water source and water use. The time scale over which precipitation deficits accumulate becomes extremely important and functionally separates different types of drought. Agricultural (soil moisture) droughts, for example, typically have a much shorter time scale than hydrologic (groundwater, streamflow and reservoir) droughts.

Many examples are available where quantitative links have been established between precipitation deficits and drought impacts in particular water use areas. These use-specific relationships will likely continue to be expanded to assist in crop yield predictions, hydroelectric power projections and in many other drought-sensitive fields. However, the importance of monitoring and assessing water supply from a general climate perspective beginning with precipitation has not diminished.

Five practical issues become important in any analysis of drought. These include: 1) time scale, 2) probability, 3) precipitation deficit, 4) application of the definition to precipitation and to the five water supply variables, and 5) the relationship of the definition to the impacts of drought. Frequency, duration and intensity of drought all become functions that depend on the implicitly or explicitly established time scales. Our experience in providing drought information to a collection of decision makers in Colorado is that they have a need for current conditions expressed in terms of probability, water deficit, and water supply as a percent of average using recent climatic history (the last 30 to 100 years) as the basis for comparison. No single drought definition or analysis method has emerged that addresses all these issues well. Of the variety of definitions and drought monitoring methods used in the past, by far the most widely used in the United States is the Palmer Drought Index (Palmer, 1965), but its weaknesses (Alley, 1984) frequently limit its wise application. For example, time scale is not defined for the Palmer Index but does inherently exist.

The purpose of the following discussion is to propose an indicator and definition of drought which could serve as a versatile tool in drought monitoring and analysis. This indicator requires only one input variable, could be applied in a similar way to precipitation, snowpack, streamflow, reservoir storage, soil moisture, and ground water, recognizes a variety of time scales, and provides information on precipitation deficit, percent of average and probability.

2 A FUNCTIONAL DEFINITION OF DROUGHT

The definition of drought proposed here is based on standardized precipitation. Standardized precipitation is simply the difference of precipitation from the mean for a specified time period divided by the standard deviation where the mean and standard deviation are determined from past records. This same method can also be used to evaluate variations in any of the five usable water sources. A disadvantage of this simple method is that precipitation is typically not normally distributed for accumulation periods of 12 months or less, but this can be overcome by applying a transformation to the distribution. The resulting computation of standardized precipitation is linearly proportional to precipitation deficit and allows specification of probability, percent of average, and accumulated precipitation deficit. The basic approach is to use standardized precipitation for a set of time scales which together represent water sources of several types. Soule (1990) used standardized precipitation in a study of spatial patterns. Bhalme and Mooley (1980) also used the standardized precipitation as a starting point for a drought definition.

The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is calculated in the following sequence. A monthly precipitation data set is prepared for a period of m months, ideally a continuous period of at least 30 years. A set of averaging periods are selected to determine a set of time scales of period j months where j is 3, 6, 12, 24, or 48 months. These represent arbitrary but typical time scales for precipitation deficits to affect the five types of usable water sources. The data set is moving in the sense that each month a new value is determined from the previous i months. Each of the data sets are fitted to the Gamma function to define the relationship of probability to precipitation.

Once the relationship of probability to precipitation is established from the historic records, the probability of any observed precipitation data point is calculated and used along with an estimate of the inverse normal to calculate the precipitation deviation for a normally distributed probability density with a mean of zero and standard deviation of unity. This value is the SPI for the particular precipitation data point.

The SPI calculated in this way has the following desirable traits: The SPI is uniquely related to probability.

The precipitation used in SPI can be used to calculate the precipitation deficit for the current period.

The precipitation used in SPI can be used to calculate the current percent of average precipitation for time period of i months.

The SPI is normally distributed so it can be used to monitor wet as well as dry periods.

SPI can be calculated for the other water variables of snowpack, reservoir, streamflow, soil moisture, and ground water.

The SPI is normalized so that wetter and drier climates will be represented in a similar way.

An example of the SPI for Fort Collins, CO, is shown in Figure 1 for i = 3, 6, 12, 24, and 48 months for the period 1889-1991. When the time periods are small (3 or 6 months), the SPI moves frequently above and below zero. As the time period is lengthened to 12,24, and 48 months, the SPI responds more slowly to changes in precipitation. Periods with the SPI negative and positive become fewer in number but longer in duration.

Using the SPI as the indicator, a functional and quantitative definition of drought can be established for each time scale. A drought event for time scale i is defined here as a period in which the SPI is continuously negative and the SPI reaches a value of -1.0 or less. The drought begins when the SPI first falls below zero and ends with the positive value of SPI following a value of -1.0 or less. Drought intensity is arbitrarily defined for values of the SPI with the following categories:

In a long-term climate record each category ≤ -1.00 will be represented a known amount of time which is indicated above.

The definition of drought thus far has included a beginning date, ending date, and a current drought intensity. Duration of drought can be either a current duration since the beginning or the duration of a historic drought event from beginning to ending. Peak intensity can easily be determined from the SPI. A measure of the accumulated magnitude of the drought can be included. Drought M,agnitude (DM) is defined as：

where j starts with the first month of a drought and continues to increase until thle end of the drought (x) for any of the i time scales. The OM has units of months and would be nLlmerically equivalent to drought duration if each month of the drought has SPI = -1.0. In fact, many drolJghts will have a OM very similar to the duration in months since most of the SPI values are between 0 and -2.0.