Abstract
The complexity and randomness of drought events make its description difficult. Although previous studies have analyzed the characteristics of drought events in different regions, there are few studies to explore the influence of the selection of time intervals on the extraction of drought events. To make up for the deficiency of traditional drought event characteristic analysis, we compared and analyzed the drought event characteristics extracted at different time intervals (1, 5, 10, and all years). Additionally, a new drought event percentage area index was constructed based on the non-divided time method. The Mann–Kendall and Theil-Sen analysis methods were used to investigate its variation trend from 1960 to 2018. The results show that the shorter the time interval, the more significant the change in drought severity, but the more likely it is to separate a drought event, causing accuracy errors. Furthermore, the extraction of drought events with a short time interval tends to underestimate the time change of extreme drought and overestimate the time change of mild drought. Moreover, the non-divided method can more accurately extract the features of drought events. The drought event percentage index can effectively quantify the drought situation in different regions by introducing the spatial dimension’s description. The global drought event percentage index rose slightly from 1960 to 2018, with a slope of 0.026% per year. Finally, the drought event characteristic analysis methods adopted in this paper are flexible, effective, and simple, providing possible scientific references for other types of drought research.
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Data availability
The scPDSI data that support the findings of this study are available at http://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi. The characteristics of drought events and other data that extracted in this article are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Code availability
The codes that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author.
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Funding
This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (No. 2021J01627) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41601562).
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Rongrong Zhang: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, software, investigation, writing—original draft. Xiaoping Wu: formal analysis, investigation, data curation, writing—review & editing. Xiaozhen Zhou, Binyu Ren, and Jingyu Zeng: investigation, validation, writing—review & editing. Qianfeng Wang: conceptualization, methodology, project administration, validation, writing—review & editing, supervision, funding acquisition.
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Zhang, R., Wu, X., Zhou, X. et al. Investigating the effect of improved drought events extraction method on spatiotemporal characteristics of drought. Theor Appl Climatol 147, 395–408 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03838-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03838-z