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A multimodel assessment of drought characteristics and risks over the Huang-Huai-Hai River basin, China, under climate change

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Abstract

Drought has become one of the most serious meteorological disasters for agricultural production in many areas around the world, and the situation could be worse under the impact of climate change. To facilitate better adaptation planning, this study proposed a drought assessment framework integrating downscaling method, drought index, copula technique, and bivariate frequency analysis, and applied it to investigate the change of the drought characteristics and drought risks from the past to the future in Huang-Huai-Hai River basin (HRB), North China. Drought was firstly defined by standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) based on 1497 observed grid data from 1979 to 2004. Then, we constructed the joint distribution of drought duration and severity based on copulas to detect and quantify the drought risks. To address the effect of climate change, similar calculation process was applied to the future climate data, which was downscaled using delta change method from representative concentration pathway (RCP 8.5) of 12 general circulation models (GCMs). The study results suggested that, under climate change condition, most irrigation districts over HRB would generally experience lower frequency of drought events but with extended duration; some districts would have more serious drought, but majority would experience similar or even lower level of severity. In light of the mean joint occurrence probability, the irrigation district at the south part of Huai River basin would likely experience the highest increase of drought risks in near future (by 0.86%) and distant future (by 0.76%), while most of other districts over HRB would face low risk of serious drought risks. The obtained results offer useful information to agricultural managers or water resources authorities who are interested in the development of effective long-term adaptation strategies for drought management.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table 2 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP, the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. The authors are grateful to the reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, which have greatly helped to improve the paper.

Funding

This project was supported by Start-Up Grant (M4081327.030) from School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore

    C. Dai & X. S. Qin

  2. Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100012, China

    W. T. Lu & H. K. Zang

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  1. C. Dai
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Correspondence to X. S. Qin.

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Dai, C., Qin, X.S., Lu, W.T. et al. A multimodel assessment of drought characteristics and risks over the Huang-Huai-Hai River basin, China, under climate change. Theor Appl Climatol 141, 601–613 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03236-x

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