Drought Trends in Balochistan

Abstract

Drought is a severe threat, especially in the arid regions of Pakistan, such as the Balochistan Province. The aim of this study is to analyze drought trends in Balochistan using Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) at the 3-month accumulation timescale. The monthly rainfall data of 10 stations were collected from the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) for 37 years (1980–2017). Drought trends were analyzed at each station using the Mann-Kendall test. The SPI identified extreme drought events in 1996, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2009, and 2014. Barkhan was the station that most frequently experienced extreme to severe drought events, as defined using SPI. A statistically significant decreasing precipitation trend was found in four stations (Dalbandin, Jiwani, Quetta, and Zhob). The analysis of drought characteristics showed Barkhan faced the most prolonged drought, of 22 months from 1999 to 2001. The findings from the present study can give guidance on how strategies of water management should be adjusted based on the changing patterns of droughts in the Balochistan Province.

The impact of climate indices on precipitation variability in Baluchistan, Pakistan

“…Mann-Kendall for trend detection. The Mann-Kendall (MK) test was largely used in identifying trends in climate variables (Libiseller and Grimvall, 2002;Bastiaanssen and Ali, 2003;Arif et al, 2004;Webster et al, 2011;Kreft and Eckstein, 2013;Eckstein et al, 2019;Naz et al, 2020). The MK test is a non-parametric test based on ranks and is not sensitive to sudden breaks in the uneven data.…”

“…Numerous studies have been done on the climate of Pakistan; however, it is not significant as compare to Pakistan's vulnerability to get affected from adverse climate change (Eckstein et al, 2019;Jamro et al, 2019;Naz et al, 2020). According to Global Climate Risk Index (GCRI) report Pakistan is not only among the most vulnerable countries but its vulnerability is also increasing with the passage of time.…”

“…Precipitation and droughts around the globe are strongly related to climate indices through atmospheric linkages or teleconnection (Jamro et al, 2019;Naz et al, 2020). Throughout the world, these climate indices link nearby regions predominantly through large scale, Qausi stationary atmospheric Rossby waves, as a result of which some regions receive more precipitation or are hotter than the prevailing global scale changes (IPCC, 2014).…”

“…studied precipitation trends on Swat river basin by using MK test and Spearman's rho test. Iqbal and Athar (2018) also selected MK test for trend analysis and most recently Naz et al (2020) used MK test to find the drought trends in Baluchistan. The changes in precipitation's trends in the presence of climate indices are determined by using Partial Mann-Kendall, which is the best one step method that do the adjustment for the covariate and trend detection at the same time (Abraham et al, 2001;Burn and Elnur, 2002;Libiseller and Grimvall, 2002;Yue et al, 2002;Libiseller, 2004;Machiwal and Jha, 2009;Scarpati et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2012;Yang et al, 2012;Hajani et al, 2017).…”

“…The study area i.e. Baluchistan is selected for this investigation as it is the most vulnerable province among all the four provinces of Pakistan (Jamro et al, 2019;Naz et al, 2020), faced many severe droughts (Ashraf et al, 2014;Ashraf and Ashfaq, 2017), and is already under drought warning by Pakistan metrological department (Islamic Relief Pakistan, 2018). Recently few drought studies have been conducted on Baluchistan, but no focused study has been carried out on the precipitation variability and its link to large scale dynamics.…”