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Assessment of agricultural drought in rainfed cereal production areas of northern China

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Abstract

Agricultural drought assessment is an important tool for water management in water-scarce regions such as Inner Mongolia and northeastern China. Conventional methods have difficulty of clarifying long-term influences of drought on regional agricultural production. To accurately evaluate regional agricultural drought, we assessed the performance of drought indices by constructing a new assessment framework with three components: crop model calibration and validation, drought index calculation, and index assessment (standard period setting, mean value and agreement assessments). The Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) model simulated well of county-level wheat and maize yields in the nine investigated counties. We calculated a major crop-specific index yield reduction caused by water stress (WSYR) in the EPIC crop model, by relating potential and rainfed yields. Using 26 agricultural drought cases, we compared WSYR with two meteorological drought indices: precipitation (P) and aridity index (AI). The results showed that WSYR had greater agreement (85 %) than either the precipitation (65 %) or aridity index (68 %). The temporal trend of the indices over the period 1962–2010 was tested using three approaches. The result via WSYR revealed a significant increase in the trend of agricultural drought in drought-prone counties, which could not be shown by the precipitation and aridity indices. Total number of dry year via WSYR from 1990s to 2000s increases more sharply than via P or AI. As shown by WSYR, the number of dry years in northeastern China and Inner Mongolia is generally increasing, particularly after the 2000s, in the western part of the study area. The study reveals the usefulness of the framework for drought index assessment and indicates the potential of WSYR and possible drought cases for drought classification.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Global Center of Excellence Project for Dryland Science of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. The authors would like to thank Dr. Nigussie Haregeweyn for valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Arid Land Research Center, Tottori University, Hamasaka 1390, Tottori, 680-0001, Japan

    Rui Li & Atsushi Tsunekawa

  2. Agricultural Research Council, Institute for Soil, Climate and Water, 600 Belvedere Street, Arcadia, Pretoria, 0083, South Africa

    Mitsuru Tsubo

  3. Department of Soil, Crop and Climate Sciences, University of the Free State, PO Box 339, Bloemfontein, 9300, South Africa

    Mitsuru Tsubo

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  1. Rui Li
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Correspondence to Rui Li.

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Li, R., Tsunekawa, A. & Tsubo, M. Assessment of agricultural drought in rainfed cereal production areas of northern China. Theor Appl Climatol 127, 597–609 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-015-1657-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-015-1657-x

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