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An analysis of the drought in Yunnan, China, from a perspective of society drought severity

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Abstract

Drought disaster management entails not only understanding meteorological drought as a natural hazard but also evaluating the adverse societal impacts related to the economy and human lives. For the purpose of quantifying the drought severity from the perspective of society drought, a drought index, namely “Society Drought Severity Index” (SDSI), was put forward to analyze the drought in Yunnan Province of China. In SDSI for Yunnan, the drought severity was represented by the weighted discrepancy between the “appropriate” water needs and the total available water resources, inspired by the established Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). Technically, the trend in historical water consumption records in agricultural, industrial, and domestic sectors was applied to represent the appropriate water needs; an apparent “runoff” was used to represent the available water resource in Yunnan. The SDSI of Yunnan revealed a trend toward increasing drought severity, which resulted from a combination of meteorological changes and water needs escalation. Moreover, the spatial center of the 2010 drought in Yunnan based on SDSI was different from that identified by PDSI, which exactly reflected the influence of water needs on drought severity. The SDSI was deemed to be a beneficial tool for drought disaster management and drought risk governance.

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Acknowledgments

This research was financially supported jointly by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2009SD-20), the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20090003120016), and the special fund of the State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control (10K05ESPCT). The authors would like to thank Mr. Wang, Chunxue in Sichuan Climate Center of China for his important help in SDSI calculation coding and to thank Prof. Wu, JianJun and Mr. He, Shouliang and Mr. Lu, Chao in Beijing Normal University for their insightful advices.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster (Ministry of Education), Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Jiajin Wang & Yaobin Meng

  2. Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Jiajin Wang & Yaobin Meng

  3. State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Yaobin Meng

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  1. Jiajin Wang
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Correspondence to Yaobin Meng.

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 11, 12 and Table 4.

Fig. 11
figure 11

The appropriate domestic water consumption. The hollow box corresponds to observed records. The solid line is the appropriate record

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Fig. 12
figure 12

The appropriate agriculture water consumption. The hollow box corresponds to observed records. The solid line is the appropriate record

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Table 4 The ΔAIC results
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Wang, J., Meng, Y. An analysis of the drought in Yunnan, China, from a perspective of society drought severity. Nat Hazards 67, 431–458 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-013-0572-7

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