Examining drought behaviour using departure index and rainfall anomaly index in Nambiyar river basin, Tamil nadu

R Rajee; V Emayavaramban

doi:10.53989/bu.ge.v7i2.6

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Geo-Eye

DOI: 10.53989/bu.ge.v7i2.6

Year: 2018, Volume: 7, Issue: 2, Pages: 20-24

Original Article

Examining drought behaviour using departure index and rainfall anomaly index in Nambiyar river basin, Tamil nadu

R Rajee¹, V Emayavaramban²

¹Research Scholar, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, 625021
²Professor, Department of Geography, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, 625021

Received Date:21 October 2018, Accepted Date:14 November 2018

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Drought is one of the complex natural phenomena. In extreme cases, drought causes great damage to the economy and human life. Drought is caused by a lack of long-term rainfall. The humans as well as the environment are greatly affected due to drought. It is not related to particular climate regions but it causes a similar effect in all climatic regions of the world. There are several drought-prone areas in India so the Government of India has developed a Drought Affected Area Plan which is being implemented in drought-prone areas. An attempt has been made in this paper studying two drought indices such as Departure Index (DI) and Rainfall Anomaly Index (RAI) in the Nambiyar River Basin of Tamil Nadu to assess the drought condition. Only 3 classifications (moderate, mild, and no droughts) are observed in the Departure Index. Mild drought years are highly found in the Nambiyar River basin followed by moderate and no droughts. Chidambarapuram, Nainaputhoor station had a maximum drought of 24 years and 6 years of moderate drought is observed in Vallioor station. The frequency of drought years for RAI index are repeatedly noted high during the year 2003, 2016, and Keeriparai station had the highest negative anomaly value of -10.67 in the year 2017.

Keywords: Rainfall; RAI; DI; drought; Nambiyar river basin

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Copyright

© 2018 Rajee & Emayavaramban. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Published By Bangalore University, Bengaluru, Karnataka