Drought characterization using a new copula-based trivariate approach

Meteorological drought is a natural climatic phenomenon that occurs over various time scales and may cause significant economic, environmental and social damages. Three drought characteristics, namely duration, average severity and peak intensity, are important variables in water resources planning and decision making. This study presents a new method for construction of three-dimensional copulas to describe the joint distribution function of meteorological drought characteristics. Using the inference function for margins, the parameters for six types of copulas were tested to select the best-fitted copulas. According to the values of the log-likelihood function, Galambos, Frank and Clayton were the selected copula models to describe the dependence structure for pairs of duration–severity, severity–peak and duration–peak, respectively. Trivariate cumulative probability, conditional probability and drought return period were also investigated based on the derived copula-based joint distributions. The proposed model was evaluated over the observed data of a Qazvin synoptic station, and the results were compared with the empirical probabilities. For measuring the model accuracy, R <Superscript>2</Superscript>, root mean square error (RMSE) and the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) criteria were used. Results indicated that R <Superscript>2</Superscript>, RMSE and NSE were equal to 0.91, 0.098 and 0.668, respectively, which demonstrate sufficient accuracy of the proposed model. Drought probabilistic characteristics can provide useful information for water resource planning and management. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014