“…Given the extensive serious impacts of drought, understanding its causes in the past and projecting future drought conditions is an important task in drought studies, and has been well received in the literature. Many recent studies have employed various drought indices and have assessed trends in drought duration or severity (Dubrovský et al, 2014;Park et al, 2014;Yu et al, 2014;Duffy et al, 2015;Madhu et al, 2015;Swain and Hayhoe, 2015), investigated the relationship of drought and climate teleconnections (Kam et al, 2014;Huang et al, 2015;Meque and Abiodun, 2015;Ujeneza and Abiodun, 2015), or evaluated the causes of a particular drought event (Griffin and Anchukaitis, 2014;Diffenbaugh et al, 2015;Mao et al, 2015;Seager et al, 2015;Williams et al, 2015;Otkin et al, 2016). Improvements in accuracy and spatial resolution of datasets as well as greater availability and accessibility to ensembles of models with more realistic physical assumptions, allows for a better assessment of drought attributes in different regions while also characterizing the uncertainty of drought projections (Barnston and Lyon, 2016).…”