Analysis of Drought Dynamics over Annual Maximum Drought Severity Series Based on Daily Index Definitions

© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.Drought, which emerges with regional impacts of unbalanced climate dynamics developing continuously on a global scale, is a phenomenon that needs continuous analysis both in time and space. The most fundamental means of analyzing drought are through drought indices which depend on various data requirements and are computed for depicting different types of droughts causing meteorological, hydrologic, social, and/or economic impacts on water-dependent societies and economic sectors. One of the major shortcomings of working with drought indices is the limited availability of input data which should supply temporal and spatial continuity. Traditional ways of analyzing drought indices are greatly based on measurements within available networks of hydro-meteorological stations, even though the continuous nature of climatic conditions will require distributed assessments, which cannot be simply represented by spatial interpolations from point analyses. Similar concerns arise in relation to the temporal continuity of drought events as drought characteristics may evolve in periods much less than the monthly scale as broadly analysed today. To this end, the presented study employs a framework that compares (1) drought pulses in historically observed monthly records from point station locations, (2) drought signals over spatially enhanced monthly input data by considering gridded meteorological variables, and (3) further assessments based on temporally higher resolution precipitation data on a daily time scale again with the use of spatially distributed precipitation variable. The mapped study results help compare critical drought characteristics of estimated future scenario conditions to those of the reference period 1971–2004