The Influence of a Prolonged Meteorological Drought on the Catchment Water Storage Capacity: A Hydrological Model Perspective

Abstract

18Understanding the propagation process of prolonged meteorological droughts (i.e., decade) helps 19 solve the problem of increasing water scarcity around the world. Historical literature studied the 20 propagation between different drought types (e.g., from meteorological to hydrological drought) 21 with mainly statistical approaches, however, little attention has been paid to the causality between 22 the change point); (2) to analyze which catchment properties and climate characteristics are more 129 promising to be related to the shift in CWSC; and (3) to explore the possible association between 130 catchment properties and climate characteristics with the time-lag between the onset of the 131 meteorological drought and the change point. 132The remainder of this study is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the study area and research 133 data. Section 3 illustrates the methodology to explore the questions mentioned above. Section 4 134 provides the results of catchments with significant and non-significant changes in CWSC as well as 135 catchments with different change directions due to a prolonged meteorological drought, illustrates 136 the association results between the shift in CWSC and time-lag with the potential variables (include 137 catchment properties and climate characteristics). Section 5 provides discussions of our results. 138