Assessment of Drought Severity and Their Spatio-Temporal Variations in the Hyper Arid Regions of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: A Case Study from Al-Lith and Khafji Watersheds

The goal of this study is to calculate meteorological drought using the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standard Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) for the Al-Lith and Khafji basins of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) from 2001 to 2020. The in situ (rain gauges, RGs) and Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) data are used in the current study. The meteorological drought is monitored across the AL-Lith and Khafji watersheds. The climate of the Khafji watershed is like the climate of Al-Lith to some extent. Still, due to complex terrain, Al-Lith receives relatively high precipitation and has a higher average temperature than the Khafji watershed. Results show that the total drought periods observed are 166 and 139 months based on SPEI and SPI on a multiple time scale (1, 3, 6, and 12 months) in the Al-Lith watershed, respectively. While, based on SPEI and SPI, the Khafji watershed experienced a drought of 129 and 72 months, respectively. This finding indicates that the SPEI-calculated drought is more severe and persistent in both watersheds than the SPI-calculated drought. Additionally, the correlation coefficient (CC) between SPI and SPEI is investigated; a very low correlation is observed at a smaller scale. CC values of 0.86 and 0.93 for Al-Lith and 0.61 and 0.79 for the Khafji watershed are observed between SPEI-1/SPI-1 and SPEI-3/SPI-3. However, the correlation is significant at high temporal scales, i.e., 6 and 12 months, with CC values of 0.95 and 0.98 for Al-Lith and 0.86 to 0.94 for the Khafji watershed. Overall, the study compared the performance of IMERG with RGs to monitor meteorological drought, and IMERG performed well across both watersheds during the study period. Therefore, the current study recommends the application of IMERG for drought monitoring across data-scarce regions of KSA. Furthermore, SPEI estimates a more severe and long-lasting drought than SPI because of the temperature factor it considers.

Automated summary

This study aims to calculate meteorological drought using SPI and SPEI in the Al-Lith and Khafji basins of Saudi Arabia. The results show that SPEI-calculated drought is more severe and persistent than SPI-calculated drought. IMERG performs well in monitoring meteorological drought in both basins.