Publication Details

Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.5194/hess-22-2269-2018
Licence creative commons licence
Title (Primary) Reconstruction of droughts in India using multiple land-surface models (1951–2015)
Author Mishra, V.; Shah, R.; Azhar, S.; Shah, H.; Modi, P.; Kumar, R. ORCID logo
Source Titel Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
Year 2018
Department CHS
Volume 22
Issue 4
Page From 2269
Page To 2284
Language englisch
UFZ wide themes RU5;
Abstract India has witnessed some of the most severe droughts in the current decade and severity, frequency, and areal extent of droughts have been increasing. As a large population of India is dependent on agriculture, soil moisture droughts adversely affect agriculture and groundwater resources. Due to lack of observations, soil moisture is generally simulated using land surface hydrological models (LSMs), however, these LSMs have uncertainty due to model parameterization. Here we reconstruct agricultural drought events during the period of 1951–2015 based on simulated soil moisture from three LSMs, the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC), the Noah, and the Community Land Model (CLM). We find a higher uncertainty in soil moisture droughts over a large part of India during the major crop growing season (Rabi season, November to February: NDJF) than that of the monsoon season (June to September: JJAS). Moreover, uncertainty in drought estimates is higher for severe and localized droughts. Higher uncertainty in the soil moisture droughts is largely due to the difference in model parameterizations; resulting in different persistence of soil moisture simulated by the three LSMs. Our study highlights the importance of accounting for the LSMs uncertainty and consideration of multimodel ensemble for the real-time monitoring and prediction of drought over India.
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=19187
Mishra, V., Shah, R., Azhar, S., Shah, H., Modi, P., Kumar, R. (2018):
Reconstruction of droughts in India using multiple land-surface models (1951–2015)
Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 22 (4), 2269 - 2284 10.5194/hess-22-2269-2018