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Application of Copulas in Hydrometeorological Drought Risk Analysis Under Climate Change Scenarios- a Case Study

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Abstract

An in-depth understanding of drought frequency analysis in a river basin is possible only with a drought characterisation study. Multiple drought characteristics associated with the drought make it essential to analyse their joint behaviour in drought frequency analysis. Conventional univariate frequency analysis may produce overestimated or underestimated drought risk magnitudes. This study utilised the capability of bivariate copulas to construct the joint dependency amongst four drought characteristics (severity, duration, peak, and interarrival time) derived from the drought indices (Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI), Standardised Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), and Standardized Streamflow Index (SSI)) in a tropical river basin, the Bharathapuzha, India, during the historic period and climate change scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5). Appropriate distributions were selected for modelling the drought characteristics to capture the probabilistic behaviour. The best marginal distribution of each characteristic is obtained from the goodness of fit measures. Various copulas from the Archimedean and Elliptical families were applied to construct the four-dimensional joint distributions. Subsequently, the best-fit copula obtained the joint return periods. The results of joint dependence show that the Clayton and Gaussian copulas best fit with meteorological and hydrological drought, respectively, and the spatial investigation at the median threshold of the joint return period provides the hotspots of drought recurrences in the river basin with return periods in the range of 2 to 8 years during the historic period, greater than four years and greater than six years for RCP 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios.

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The data and materials used for the study are available freely in the public domains as mentioned in the manuscript.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, editor, and associate editor of the journal. The first author would like to thank the Ministry of Education, India, for supporting the work in the form of a Ph.D. fellowship. We also thank the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), Pune, for providing rainfall and temperature data, and Central Water Commission of India for providing the streamflow data.

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  1. Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kozhikode, India

    Jincy Rose M.A & Chithra N.R

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Contributions

Jincy Rose M.A was involved in the data collection, investigation, methodology, formal analysis, model development, software, and writing—original draft; Chithra N.R contributed to the investigation, supervision, and writing—review and editing, data curation, and validation.

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Correspondence to Jincy Rose M.A.

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M.A, J.R., N.R, C. Application of Copulas in Hydrometeorological Drought Risk Analysis Under Climate Change Scenarios- a Case Study. Water Resour Manage 37, 5399–5429 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-023-03612-y

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