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Atmosphere
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Drought in Arid and Semi-arid Regions
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Drought in Arid and Semi-arid Regions

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Climatology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 13927

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Hao Guo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Geography and Tourism, Qufu Normal University, Rizhao 276825, China
Interests: drought monitoring; drought identification and characterization; drought impacts and effects; arid and semi-arid regions; climate change; compound drought; remote sensing
Dr. Guoxiong Zheng

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
Interests: vegetation; natural hazards; climate change; remote sensing
Dr. Liangliang Jiang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Geography and Tourism, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing 401331, China
Interests: drought monitoring; land degradation; desertification; Central Asia

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Drought is a natural disaster caused by climate variability which leads to significant social, environmental, and economic damages. Drought may occur in any region of the world, but it is more intense and frequent in arid and semi-arid regions due to the large variability of climate in such regions. Arid and semi-arid regions are generally characterized by water scarcity and low per-capita water allocation. Water deficit in such regions is highly variable in time, space, amount, and duration. Ecosystems in semi-arid and arid regions are under water stress and can be particularly vulnerable to even slight drought changes. Droughts may introduce environmental degradation and desertification. Therefore, studies on drought monitoring and drought impacts assessment are important for the sustainable development of both society and the environment in semi-arid and arid regions. Precipitation, temperature, and the water cycle are experiencing large changes under the background of climate change. On a global scale, the frequency, duration, and severity of heatwaves and droughts have increased substantially in recent decades, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. Studies on drought monitoring, drought risk assessment, drought event characterization, drought mechanism analysis, drought impacts on both ecosystem and society, and drought change projection are very helpful for drought risk management.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to provide an overview of the research advancements, scientific perspectives, existing challenges, and future directions for drought monitoring, management, mechanisms, and impacts in arid and semi-arid regions. Related studies or other experiences are welcome as long as they are rigorously presented and scientifically evaluated. The contributions to this Special Issue cover a wide range of topics in semi-arid and arid droughts including, but not limited to:

  • Drought monitoring in semi-arid and arid regions;
  • Drought index development, comparison, and applications;
  • Climate variability, climate change, and trends in drought or related variables in semi-arid and arid regions;
  • Innovative methods to visualize drought conditions;
  • Drought mechanism analysis;
  • Uncertainty in drought monitoring and forecasting;
  • Drought impacts or effects on environment and society;
  • Drought risk management;
  • Flash droughts, compound droughts, or other types of drought.

Dr. Hao Guo
Dr. Guoxiong Zheng
Dr. Liangliang Jiang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • drought monitoring
  • drought mechanism
  • drought risk
  • drought impacts
  • compound drought
  • arid and semi-arid regions
  • climate change

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

33 pages, 16285 KiB  
Article
Assessment of Meteorological Drought under the Climate Change in the Kabul River Basin, Afghanistan
by Massouda Sidiqi, Kasiapillai S. Kasiviswanathan, Traugott Scheytt and Suresh Devaraj
Atmosphere 2023, 14(3), 570; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14030570 - 16 Mar 2023
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 3637
Abstract
Kabul River Basin is one of the most significant river basins in Afghanistan from a socio-economic perspective. Since the country is located in an arid climate zone with drastically varying climatic behavior, an effective assessment of meteorological drought is very essential to managing [...] Read more.
Kabul River Basin is one of the most significant river basins in Afghanistan from a socio-economic perspective. Since the country is located in an arid climate zone with drastically varying climatic behavior, an effective assessment of meteorological drought is very essential to managing the limited availability of water resources. For this endeavor, the outputs of three general circulation models under two representative concentration pathways (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) were used against the baseline period of 1961–1980. Different bias correction methods were applied, and the results show that the delta change method, quantile mapping method, and empirical quantile mapping all performed better for the precipitation, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature datasets, respectively. The ERA5-Land datasets and WorldClim Version 2 are used to validate the bias-corrected precipitation and temperature datasets, respectively, to determine their dependability, and the results were found to be promising. Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI), Deciles Index (DI), and New Drought Index (NDI) were used to assess the drought condition in the past and forecast for the future periods of the 2020s, 2050s, and 2080s. The spatial distribution of assessed drought indices was mapped using the inverse distance weighting (IDW) method. Our results revealed that moderate to extreme droughts are consistent across the entire basin. This might be because the projected annual precipitation in the river basin shows a decline of 53–65% up to the end of this century (2100), and the average annual temperature is projected to increase by 1.8 °C, 3.5 °C, and 4.8 °C, respectively, for the three future periods of the 2020s, 2050s, and 2080s. Furthermore, the results show that the drought estimated by SPI and RDI for future climate scenarios is almost the same, whereas NDI estimates frequent drought events after the 2050s. However, for moderate drought, RDI, which includes the effects of evapotranspiration, was found to be far greater than SPI under both scenarios, and NDI considering temperature and precipitation also estimates a larger number of drought years, strengthening the possibility of its occurrence in the basin. A regional comparison of drought also indicates a decrease in precipitation in future periods, predominantly in high altitudes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Drought in Arid and Semi-arid Regions)
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15 pages, 3813 KiB  
Article
SPI-3 Analysis of Medjerda River Basin and Gamma Model Limits in Semi-Arid and Arid Contexts
by Zoubeida Kebaili Bargaoui and Sabrine Jemai
Atmosphere 2022, 13(12), 2021; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13122021 - 1 Dec 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1599
Abstract
The Standardized Precipitation Index SPI-3, associated with three months of rainfall accumulation, is a drought index for detecting immediate drought impacts. The two-parameter gamma distribution, recommended by the World Meteorological Organization as the underlying distribution for estimating SPI, has shown limits [...] Read more.
The Standardized Precipitation Index SPI-3, associated with three months of rainfall accumulation, is a drought index for detecting immediate drought impacts. The two-parameter gamma distribution, recommended by the World Meteorological Organization as the underlying distribution for estimating SPI, has shown limits in semi-arid and arid conditions with respect to the normality test for the resulting SPI series. Our purpose was to evaluate its relevance for the Medjerda River Basin (Tunisia), a transboundary basin where the climate classes are temperate, dry, and hot summer, as well as arid hot desert and arid hot steppe. When analyzing the time series of 144 stations from 1950 to 2018, we found that the normality Shapiro–Wilk test was rejected in 17% of the cases, which agreed with the literature review results. The transition season (August, September, and October) had the highest rejection percentage. Three factors were identified to explain the deviation from normality. We first identified the rate of occurrence of completely dry (zero rain) three-month periods. The higher the rate of occurrence was, the higher that the probability was of its rejecting the normality test. High sample skewness was the second influencing factor. Finally, a series where the Grubbs’ test of identifying outliers was rejected was more likely to show the SPI-3 series deviating from normality. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Drought in Arid and Semi-arid Regions)
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19 pages, 5041 KiB  
Article
Error Characteristic Analysis of Satellite-Based Precipitation Products over Mainland China
by Hanjia Fu, Li Zhu, Vincent Nzabarinda, Xiaoyu Lv and Hao Guo
Atmosphere 2022, 13(8), 1211; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13081211 - 1 Aug 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1735
Abstract
Satellite-based precipitation products (SPPs) provide valuable precipitation information for various applications. Their performance, however, varies significantly from region to region due to various data sources and production processes. This paper aims to evaluate four selected SPPs (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using [...] Read more.
Satellite-based precipitation products (SPPs) provide valuable precipitation information for various applications. Their performance, however, varies significantly from region to region due to various data sources and production processes. This paper aims to evaluate four selected SPPs (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks Climate Data Record (PERSIANN-CDR), Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP), Gauge-adjusted Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMAP-gauge), and Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM)) over mainland China from 2016 to 2019. Both conventional statistical indicators (e.g., correlation coefficients (CC), root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), relative bias (RB), and Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE)) and categorical indicators (probability of detection (POD), probability of true detection (POTD), false-alarm rate (FAR), and critical success index (CSI)) are used for quantitative analysis. The results show that: (1) GSMAP-gauge and GPM perform best in reproducing the spatial distribution pattern of precipitation over mainland China, whereas SPPs generally underestimate summer precipitation with a high frequency of no-rain cases. (2) MSWEP has the best capability for recording precipitation events, although some parts of northern China exhibit abnormal overestimations for winter precipitation. (3) All SPPs, especially the PERSIANN-CDR, significantly underestimate the precipitation in the mountainous areas of southwestern China. (4) The GSMAP-gauge and GPM outperformed the other two of the four SPPs, in terms of the probability density function of daily precipitation for cases (PDFc) and the probability density function of daily precipitation for volume (PDFv). Generally, PERSIANN-CDR shows the poorest performance when compared to the other three products. The product’s algorithm for estimating heavy precipitation and mountainous precipitation needs further improvement. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Drought in Arid and Semi-arid Regions)
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19 pages, 7648 KiB  
Article
A Framework on Analyzing Long-Term Drought Changes and Its Influential Factors Based on the PDSI
by Bing Yang, Liang Kong, Chengguang Lai, Dong Huang and Xiangju Cheng
Atmosphere 2022, 13(7), 1151; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13071151 - 20 Jul 2022
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1814
Abstract
Drought is one of the most frequent and most widespread natural disasters worldwide, significantly impacting agricultural production and the ecological environment. An investigation of long-term drought changes and its influencing factors provides not only an understanding of historical droughts but also a scientific [...] Read more.
Drought is one of the most frequent and most widespread natural disasters worldwide, significantly impacting agricultural production and the ecological environment. An investigation of long-term drought changes and its influencing factors provides not only an understanding of historical droughts but also a scientific basis for the protection of future water resources. This study investigated the temporal characteristics of drought in a study site located in the center of Southwest China (SWC) over a 700-year period (AD 1300–2005) using the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). The linkage between drought and its influencing factors is discussed. An algorithm based on the random forest (RF) method was proposed to analyze the dynamic influence of the factors on drought. We also examined the linkages between the demise of two dynasties and historical drought events. The results showed that the study site was a drought-prone area in the study period and experienced a non-significant drying trend in all centuries, except for the 17th century; a total of 232 droughts were detected in the study site from AD 1300–2005. The wavelet spectrum of the PDSI series showed the existence of 4-, 8-, 16-, 32-, and 128-year-periods. A strong correlation existed between the sunspot numbers and the PDSI. The correlation of the period between the PDSI and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) series in the same frequency domain was weak, while the ENSO exhibited a strong interaction with the PDSI in some time periods. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and PDSI had no resonance period in the low-frequency region, but there was a period of 80–130 years in the high-frequency region. The relative rates of influence of the ENSO, sunspot numbers, and PDO during AD 1700–1996 were 38.40%, 31.81%, and 29.8%, respectively. However, the mechanism of the interaction between droughts and the influential factors is complex, and the dominant factor changed over time. The analysis of long-term drought changes based on the PDSI series may provide clues to understand the development of historical events. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Drought in Arid and Semi-arid Regions)
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16 pages, 4428 KiB  
Article
Evaluation and Application of MSWEP in Drought Monitoring in Central Asia
by Min Li, Xiaoyu Lv, Li Zhu, Friday Uchenna Ochege and Hao Guo
Atmosphere 2022, 13(7), 1053; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13071053 - 1 Jul 2022
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 2266
Abstract
Thanks to the large scope, high spatial resolution, and increasing data records, satellite-based precipitation products are playing an increasingly important role in drought monitoring. First, based on the data from ground sites, the long-term Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) precipitation product was evaluated in [...] Read more.
Thanks to the large scope, high spatial resolution, and increasing data records, satellite-based precipitation products are playing an increasingly important role in drought monitoring. First, based on the data from ground sites, the long-term Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) precipitation product was evaluated in respect to drought monitoring. Then, based on the MSWEP product, the drought trends and the spatiotemporal characteristics of the drought events in four major basins (Amu Darya Basin, Syr Darya Basin, Chu-Talas River Basin, and Ili River Basin) in Central Asia, which have relatively dense gauge sites, were studied. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the run theory were used to identify drought events and describe their characteristics. The results showed that MSWEP can effectively capture drought events and their basic characteristics. In the past 40 years, the study area experienced 27 drought events, among which the severest one (DS = 15.66) occurred from June 2007 to September 2008. The drought event that occurred from June 1984 to October 1984 had a drought peak value of 3.39, with the largest drought area (99.2%). Since 1881, there appeared a drying trend and a wetting trend in the Amu Darya River basin and the Ili River basin, respectively. No obvious wetting or drying trend was found in both the Chu-Talas River basin and the Syr Darya basin. Since 2016, the drought area has been on the increase. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Drought in Arid and Semi-arid Regions)
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