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A semi-empirical method for predicting hydrological drought magnitudes in the Canadian prairies

Abstract A hydrological drought magnitude (M T ) expressed in standardized terms is predicted on annual, monthly and weekly time scales for a sampling period of T years in streamflow data from the Canadian prairies. The drought episodes are considered to follow the Poisson law of probability and, when coupled with the gamma probability distribution function (pdf) of drought magnitude (M) in the extreme number theorem, culminate in a relationship capable of evaluating the expected value, E(M T ). The parameters of the underlying pdf of M are determined based on the assumption that the drought intensity follows a truncated normal pdf. The E(M T ) can be evaluated using only standard deviation (σ), lag-1 autocorrelation (ρ) of the standardized hydrological index (SHI) sequence, and a weighting parameter Φ (ranging from 0 to 1) to account for the extreme drought duration (L T ), as well as the mean drought duration (Lm ), in a characteristic drought length (Lc ). The SHI is treated as standard normal variate, equivalent to the commonly-used standardized precipitation index. A closed-form relationship can be used for the estimation of first-order conditional probabilities, which can also be estimated from historical streamflow records. For all rivers, at the annual time scale, the value of Φ was found equal to 0.5, but it tends to vary (in the range 0 to 1) from river to river at monthly and weekly time scales. However, for a particular river, the Φ value was nearly constant at monthly and weekly time scales. The proposed method estimates E(M T ) satisfactorily comparable to the observed counterpart. At the annual time scale, the assumption of a normal pdf for drought magnitude tends to yield results in close proximity to that of a gamma pdf. The M T , when transformed into deficit-volume, can form a basis for designing water storage facilities and for planning water management strategies during drought periods. Editor D. Koutsoyiannis; Associate editor C. Onof Citation Sharma, T.C. and Panu, U.S., 2013. A semi-empirical method for predicting hydrological drought magnitudes in the Canadian prairies. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 58 (3), 549–569.