Climate Change Research ›› 2023, Vol. 19 ›› Issue (3): 263-277.doi: 10.12006/j.issn.1673-1719.2022.225

• Changes in Climate System • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Spatio-temporal variations and propagation from meteorological to hydrological drought in the upper Yangtze River basin over last 120 years

LI Shuai1(), ZENG Ling2, ZHANG Cun-Jie3, XIAO Chan3, ZHANG Qiang3, GONG Wen-Ting1   

  1. 1 Operation and Administration Center for River Basin Hydro Complex, China Three Gorges Corporation, Yichang 443133, China
    2 Bureau of Hydrology, Changjiang Water Resources Commission, Wuhan 430010, China
    3 National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing 100081, China
  • Received:2022-09-27 Revised:2022-10-29 Online:2023-05-30 Published:2023-02-15

Abstract:

Meteorological drought is a precursor of hydrological drought. Understanding the propagation from meteorological to hydrological drought is important for the early warning of hydrological drought. Based on the meteorological and hydrological data from 1901 to 2020 in the upper Yangtze River basin, the characteristics of meteorological and hydrological droughts were firstly analyzed by using the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) and standardized runoff index (SRI), respectively. The tempo-spatial propagation time from meteorological to hydrological drought for each month were then calculated by the Spearman correlations and sliding window algorithm. The impacts of climate change and human activities on the propagation from meteorological to hydrological drought were finally evaluated by the humidity index (HI) and reservoir index (RI). Results are as follows. Meteorological and hydrological droughts tend to aggravate, and the larger time scale, the longer duration of both droughts. There are obvious spatio-temporal heterogeneity in propagation time from meteorological to hydrological drought, which is long in winter/in northwest, whilst short in spring, summer and autumn/in southeast. The overall drought propagation tends to be faster in spring and summer while it tends to be slower in autumn and winter, and its changes are related to both dry/wet pattern change and intensive hydropower development in the upper Yangtze River basin.

Key words: Meteorological drought, Hydrological drought, Propagation time, Spatio-temporal characteristics, The upper Yangtze River basin

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