Assessment of Agricultural Drought Vulnerability in the Guanzhong Plain, China

The Guanzhong Plain, as an important traditional agricultural area, is suffering from high frequency droughts and a trend towards more serious drought. In this paper, eight factors, precipitation, evapotranspiration, surface water availability, depth to groundwater, well yield capacity, slope, potential water storage of soil, and GDP from agriculture, are integrated into an index to represent drought vulnerability based on the overlay and index method. In this approach, according to the internal connections between factors, precipitation and evapotranspiration are integrated into the moisture index, and depth to groundwater and well yield capacity are integrated into groundwater availability. To improve the rationality and accuracy, normalization is employed to assign rating values, and the analytic hierarchy process is introduced into the weighting scheme. Two local drought monitoring datasets endorses the results of the model. The map removal sensitivity analysis indicates the vulnerability index has low sensitivity in removing each layer. The single-parameter sensitivity analysis indicates the major contribution to the vulnerability index is meteorology followed by groundwater availability and surface water availability. The vulnerability map shows the low vulnerability coincides roughly with irrigation districts on the terraces and floodplains. The northwest tableland generally has moderate vulnerability, due largely to inefficient groundwater withdrawal. The high vulnerability is concentrated at the peripheries of the plain, where agriculture is generally rain-fed without irrigation and groundwater support, and land is rugged with high slopes.