Drought is a non-negligible disaster of nature and it is mainly caused by rainfall shortage for a long time though there are many definitions of drought. 'Standard Precipitation Index' (SPI) that is widely used to express the level of meteorological drought intensity has a limit of not being able to consider the hydrological changes such as rainfall and evapotranspiration caused by climate change, because it does not consider the temperature-related variables other than the precipitation. Recently, however, 'Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index' (SPEI), a drought index of new concept which is similar to SPI but can reflect the effect of temperature variability as well as the rainfall change caused by climate variation, was developed. In this study, the changes of drought occurrence in South Korea were analyzed by applying SPEI for meteorological data (1973~2011) of 60 climate observatories under Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). As the result of application, both of SPI and SPEI showed the trend of deepening drought in spring and winter and mitigating drought in summer for the entire nation, with SPI showing greater drought intensity than SPI. Also, SPI and SPEI with 12 months of duration showed that severe droughts with low frequency of around 6 years are generally being repeated.
In this study, meteorological drought indices were examined to simulate hydrological drought. SPI (Standardized Precipitation Index) and SPEI (Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index) was applied to represent meteorological drought. Further, in order to evaluate the hydrological drought, monthly total inflow and SDI (Streamflow Drought Index) was computed. Finally, the correlation between meteorological and hydrological drought indices were analyzed. As a results, in monthly correlation comparison, the correlation between meteorological drought index and monthly total inflow was highest with 0.67 in duration of 270-day. In addition, a meteorological drought index were correlated 0.72 to 0.87 with SDI. In compared to the annual extremes, the relationship between meteorological drought index and minimum monthly inflow was hardly confirmed. But SDI and SPEI showed a slightly higher correlation. There are limitation that analyze extreme hydrological drought using meteorological drought index. For the evaluation of the hydrological drought, drought index which included inflow directly is required.
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