Climate change impact on meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological drought in central Illinois

Abstract

[1] This paper investigates the impact of climate change on drought by addressing two questions: (1) How reliable is the assessment of climate change impact on drought based on state-of-the-art climate change projections and downscaling techniques? and (2) Will the impact be at the same level from meteorological, agricultural, and hydrologic perspectives? Regional climate change projections based on dynamical downscaling through regional climate models (RCMs) are used to assess drought frequency, intensity, and duration, and the impact propagation from meteorological to agricultural to hydrological systems. The impact on a meteorological drought index (standardized precipitation index, SPI) is first assessed on the basis of daily climate inputs from RCMs driven by three general circulation models (GCMs). Two periods and two emission scenarios, i.e., 1991-2000 and 2091-2100 under B1 and A1Fi for Parallel Climate Model (PCM), 1990-1999 and 2090-2099 under A1B and A1Fi for Community Climate System Model, version 3.0 (CCSM3), 1980-1989 and 2090-2099 under B2 and A2 for Hadley Centre CGCM (HadCM3), are undertaken and dynamically downscaled through the RCMs. The climate projections are fed to a calibrated hydro-agronomic model at the watershed scale in Central Illinois, and agricultural drought indexed by the standardized soil water index (SSWI) and hydrological drought by the standardized runoff index (SRI) and crop yield impacts are assessed. SSWI, in particular with extreme droughts, is more sensitive to climate change than either SPI or SRI. The climate change impact on drought in terms of intensity, frequency, and duration grows from meteorological to agricultural to hydrological drought, especially for CCSM3-RCM. Significant changes of SSWI and SRI are found because of the temperature increase and precipitation decrease during the crop season, as well as the nonlinear hydrological response to precipitation and temperature change.

Climate change impacts on meteorological, agricultural and hydrological droughts in China

“…In this study, we used the standardized precipitation index (SPI) (McKee et al, 1993), the standardized soil moisture index (SSWI) (Wang et al, 2011a(Wang et al, , 2011b) and the standardized runoff index (SRI) (Shukla and Wood, 2008) to characterize the meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological droughts respectively. The SPI is computed on the basis of probability distributions of precipitation for specified monthly time scales.…”

“…These patterns are not confined to northern China only however. Indeed, Wu et al (2011) reconstructed China's daily soil moisture values from 1951 to 2009 and showed that up to 30% of the total area of China is prone to drought and Wang et al (2011aWang et al ( , 2011b showed that over the past 60 years severe droughts in China grew increasingly common, suggesting an increasing risk on sustainable agricultural productivity across the whole nation. Zou et al (2005) used the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) to investigate the variations in droughts over China, and Zhai et al (2010) used both PDSI and standardized precipitation index (SPI) to identify tendencies in dry/wet conditions during recent decades over ten large regions in China.…”

“…During the past decade, droughts were common in all parts of China from south to north, and resulted in serious social, economic and environmental consequences . For example, the recent winter drought which hit the northeast of China in 2008-2009 left more than 10 million people struggling with water shortages and led to total economic losses of up to $2.3 billion (Wang et al, 2011a(Wang et al, , 2011b. Other examples include, the record-breaking severe and sustained droughts occurred in 2006 (Li et al, 2009-2010(Yang et al, 2012 in Southwest China that caused devastating and far-reaching impacts to agriculture, society, the economy, and many ecosystems (Zhang et al, 2012a,b).…”

The response of agricultural drought to meteorological drought and the influencing factors: A case study in the Wei River Basin, China

“…However, few studies (e.g., Pandey and Ramasastri 2001;Wang et al, 2011;Van Loon et al, 2012) were performed toward this purpose. Most of previous studies were conducted with the aid of hydrological models.…”

“…Through various numerical experiments, previous studies indicated that drought propagation is closely associated with local landscape and local climatic conditions . Wang et al (2011) used a hydro-agronomic model to study the propagation from meteorological drought to agricultural and hydrological droughts in central Illinois. Van Loon et al (2012) applied an ensemble mean of large-scale hydrological models to evaluate drought propagations.…”