Nonparametric Approach for Bivariate Drought Characterization Using Palmer Drought Index

A drought is usually represented by duration and severity, and may last several months or years. Multidimensional characteristics of a drought make univariate analysis unable to reveal the significant relationship among drought properties. Furthermore, historical records tend to be too short to full...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of hydrologic engineering 2006-03, Vol.11 (2), p.134-143
Main Authors: Kim, Tae-Woong, Valdés, Juan B, Yoo, Chulsang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
TECHNICAL PAPERS
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:A drought is usually represented by duration and severity, and may last several months or years. Multidimensional characteristics of a drought make univariate analysis unable to reveal the significant relationship among drought properties. Furthermore, historical records tend to be too short to fully evaluate drought characteristics. A practical method was proposed in this study to estimate the bivariate return period of droughts based on the use of synthetic data to overcome the above considerations. The bivariate return period of droughts is dependent on the drought interarrival time and the joint distribution of drought properties. A nonparametric method was employed in this study to estimate the joint distribution of drought properties. The historical droughts in the Conchos River Basin, Mexico were evaluated based on their return period estimated by the proposed method. The proposed method allowed a better understanding of the joint probabilistic behavior of droughts beyond the limitation of the univariate/parametric frequency analysis.
ISSN:1084-0699
1943-5584
DOI:10.1061/(ASCE)1084-0699(2006)11:2(134)