Drought Characterisation Based on Water Surplus Variability Index

Drought assessment, characterisation and monitoring increasingly requires considering not only precipitation but also the other meteorological parameters such as an evapotranspiration. Thus, some new drought indices based on precipitation and evapotranspiration have been developed. This study introduces a new drought index named the water surplus variability index (WSVI). The procedure to estimate the index involves accumulation water surplus at different time scales. To approve the proposed procedure, the WSVI is compared with the standardized precipitation index (SPI), the reconnaissance drought index (RDI) and the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) based on 1-, 3-, 6- and 12-month timescales using data from several weather stations located in regions with different aridity index. Near perfect agreement (d ~ 1) between WSVI and SPI, RDI and SPEI was indicated in humid and sub-humid locations. The results also showed that the correlation coefficients between WSVI and SPI, RDI and SPEI were higher for semi-arid stations than for arid ones. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014