Tracing Time-Varying Characteristics of Meteorological Drought through Nonstationary Joint Deficit Index

Standardized precipitation index (SPI) is one of the frequently used meteorological drought indices. However, the time-varying characteristics observed in the historical precipitation data questions the reliability of SPI and motivated the development of nonstationary SPI. To overcome some of the limitations in the existing nonstationary drought indices, a new framework for drought index is proposed, incorporating the temporal dynamics in the precipitation. The proposed drought index is developed by coupling the joint deficit index with the extended time sliding window-based nonstationary modeling (TSW-NSM). The proposed nonstationary joint deficit index (NJDI) detects the signature of nonstationarity in the distribution parameter and models both long-term (i.e., trend) and short-term (i.e., step-change) temporal dynamics of distribution parameters. The efficacy of NJDI is demonstrated by employing it to identify the meteorological drought-prone areas over India. The changes observed in the distribution parameter of rainfall series reveal an increasing number of dry days in recent decades all over India, except the northeast. Comparison of NJDI and stationary joint deficit index (JDI) reveals that JDI overestimates drought when frequent severe dry events are clustered and underestimates when these events are scattered, which indicates that the traditional index is biased toward the lowest magnitude of precipitation while classifying the drought. Moreover, NJDI could closely capture historical droughts and their spatial variations, thereby reflecting the temporal dynamics of rainfall series and the changes in the pattern of dry events over India. NJDI proves to be a potentially reliable index for drought monitoring in a nonstationary climate.

Automated summary

The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is a commonly used meteorological drought index, but its reliability has been questioned due to the time-varying characteristics observed in historical precipitation data. To improve upon existing nonstationary drought indices, a new framework for a drought index is proposed that captures the temporal dynamics of precipitation.