Drought characteristics following Martin (2018)#

Overview#

Following Martin (2018) drought characteristics are calculated based on the standard precipitation index (SPI), see Mckee et al. (1993). These characteristics are frequency, average duration, SPI index and severity index of drought events.

Available recipes and diagnostics#

Recipes are stored in recipes/droughts/

recipe_martin18grl.yml

Diagnostics are stored in diag_scripts/droughts/

droughts/spei.R

droughts/collect_drought.py

Functions for metric calculation, plots and utility can be found in droughts/collect_drought_func.py.

User settings in recipe#

The recipe calculates SPI for two different time periods. The first part compares CMIP5 models with the CRU observational dataset. The second part compares the last 51 years of the 21st century with the historical period (1950-2000) for the RCP8.5 scenario.

The recipe can be run with different CMIP5 and CMIP6 models and one observational or reanalysis data set. The latter is specified as reference_dataset in the recipe.

The distribution (distribution: Gamma) and the representative time scale (smooth_month: 6) can be changed by the user too. A complete list of settings and their description can be found in the SPEI recipe and Collect drought API documentation.

Variables#

pr (atmos, monthly, longitude, latitude, time)

Observations and reformat scripts#

None

References#

Martin, E.R. (2018). Future Projections of Global Pluvial and Drought Event Characteristics. Geophysical Research Letters, 45, 11913-11920.
McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., & Kleist, J. (1993). The relationship of drought frequency and duration to time scales. In Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Applied Climatology (Vol. 17, No. 22, pp. 179-183). Boston, MA: American Meteorological Society.