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Assessment of hydrological drought return periods with bivariate copulas in the Tigris river basin, Turkey

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Abstract

Drought basically consists of four main components: duration, severity, intensity, and frequency. The fact that these different components having impact on drought are related to each other brings some difficulties in drought research. These parameters are generally evaluated univariate in drought analyses, however, a “joint multivariate distribution” of these parameters is required for a realistic drought assessment. Joint multivariate evaluation of drought parameters can be determined with Copula functions. In this study, hydrological drought analysis is conducted for 16 streamflow gauging stations in the Tigris Basin, Turkey, with the Streamflow Drought Index (SDI). The drought duration and severity values are extracted using Run Theory, and the best fitted marginal distribution functions of each parameter are determined among 13 distribution functions. The joint probabilities of drought duration and severity are evaluated using six different copulas (Ali-Mikhail-Haq, Clayton, Frank, Galambos, Gumbel-Hougaard and Joe), and the best representing copula is found as Galambos according to Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). Univariate return periods and bivariate return periods calculated with Galambos copula are compared and the results are evaluated spatially. It is seen that the difference between univariate return periods and bivariate return periods is in the range of 5–10% in most of the stations. As a result of the spatial analysis of the drought duration and severity in the Tigris basin with bivariate copula, it is seen that the central and western parts of the basin have a high risk.

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Data availability

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We greatly acknowledge the General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works in Turkey for providing the data used in this study.

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YA: performing analysis, interpreting results, and writing the manuscript; VG: conceptualisation, coding, writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Veysel Gumus.

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Avsaroglu, Y., Gumus, V. Assessment of hydrological drought return periods with bivariate copulas in the Tigris river basin, Turkey. Meteorol Atmos Phys 134, 95 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-022-00933-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-022-00933-2

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