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Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.5194/hess-20-1117-2016
Title (Primary) Multiscale evaluation of the Standardized Precipitation Index as a groundwater drought indicator
Author Kumar, R. ORCID logo ; Musuuza, J.L.; Van Loon, A.F.; Teuling, A.J.; Barthel, R.; Ten Broek, J.; Mai, J.; Samaniego, L. ORCID logo ; Attinger, S.
Source Titel Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
Year 2016
Department CHS
Volume 20
Issue 3
Page From 1117
Page To 1131
Language englisch
UFZ wide themes RU5;
Abstract The lack of comprehensive groundwater observations at regional and global scales has promoted the use of alternative proxies and indices to quantify and predict groundwater droughts. Among them, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is commonly used to characterize droughts in different compartments of the hydro-meteorological system. In this study, we explore the suitability of the SPI to characterize local- and regional-scale groundwater droughts using observations at more than 2000 groundwater wells in geologically
different areas in Germany and the Netherlands. A multiscale evaluation of the SPI is performed using the
station data and their corresponding 0.5° gridded estimates to analyze the local and regional behavior of groundwater droughts, respectively. The standardized anomalies in the groundwater heads (SGI) were correlated against SPIs obtained using different accumulation periods. The accumulation periods to achieve maximum correlation exhibited high spatial variability (ranges 3–36 months) at both scales, leading
to the conclusion that an a priori selection of the accumulation period (for computing the SPI) would result in inadequate characterization of groundwater droughts. The application of the uniform accumulation periods over the entire domain significantly reduced the correlation between the SPI and SGI (≈21–66 %), indicating the limited applicability of the SPI as a proxy for groundwater droughts even at long accumulation
times. Furthermore, the low scores of the hit rate (0.3–0.6) and a high false alarm ratio (0.4–0.7) at the majority of the wells and grid cells demonstrated the low reliability of groundwater drought predictions using the SPI. The findings of this study highlight the pitfalls of using the SPI as a groundwater drought indicator at both local and regional scales, and stress the need for more groundwater observations and accounting for regional hydrogeological characteristics in groundwater drought monitoring.
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=17209
Kumar, R., Musuuza, J.L., Van Loon, A.F., Teuling, A.J., Barthel, R., Ten Broek, J., Mai, J., Samaniego, L., Attinger, S. (2016):
Multiscale evaluation of the Standardized Precipitation Index as a groundwater drought indicator
Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 20 (3), 1117 - 1131 10.5194/hess-20-1117-2016