Exploring the drought condition in Namakkal District, Tamilnadu, through standardized precipitation index

S Vinothkanna; V Emayavaramban

doi:10.53989/bu.ge.v8i2.7

Article

VIEWS 1010
PDF 358

Geo-Eye

DOI: 10.53989/bu.ge.v8i2.7

Year: 2019, Volume: 8, Issue: 2, Pages: 46-53

Original Article

Exploring the drought condition in Namakkal District, Tamilnadu, through standardized precipitation index

S Vinothkanna^1*, V Emayavaramban²

¹Guest lecturer, Department of Geography, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, 625021, Tamil Nadu, India
²Professor and Head, Department of Geography, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences,
Madurai Kamaraj University, Tamil, Nadu - 625021, Madurai, India

Received Date:06 August 2019, Accepted Date:18 November 2019

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

Abstract

Drought has long been recognized as one of the major causes of human misery and being the natural disaster that annually claims the most victims. Droughts are recurring climatic events, which often hit everywhere, bringing significant water shortages, economic losses and adverse social consequences. Water scarcity can be said as the cause and effect of drought. It is not possible to avoid droughts. But drought preparedness can be developed and drought impacts can be managed. The levels of drought preparedness in countries of the region differ significantly. The success of both depends, amongst the others, on how well the droughts are defined and drought characteristics quantified. Hence, an attempt has been made in this study to identify the drought condition on rainfed namakkal district. Annual normal rainfall of Namakkal is found to vary from 478 to 860 mm with an average of 732 mm. Among the monsoons, Southwest monsoon (SWM) had higher amount of average rainfall followed by Northeast monsoon (NEM) rainfall. During SWM, except the locations Paramathy all other locations have dependable rainfall. During NEM, the locations Namakkal, Rasipuram and Paramathy had CV higher than 50 Per cent that are not dependable. Except this all other locations have dependable rainfall. Most of the locations had witnessed 1 to 6 moderate drought years in both the monsoons. The study based on SPI will be helpful for assessing the drought severity.

Keywords: Rainfall; SWM; CV; Drought; Index

References

Mckee TB, Doesken NJ, Kleist J. The relationship of drought frequency and duration to time scale. In: 8th Conf. on Applied Climatalogy. (pp. 179-184) 1993.
Vicente-Serrano S, González-Hidalgo J, Luis Md, Raventós J. drought patterns in the Mediterranean area: the Valencia region (eastern Spain) Climate Research. 2004;26:5–15. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.3354/cr026005
Liu L, Hong Y, Bednarczyk CN, Yong B, Shafer MA, Riley R, et al. Hydro-Climatological Drought Analyses and Projections Using Meteorological and Hydrological Drought Indices: A Case Study in Blue River Basin, Oklahoma. Water Resources Management. 2012;26(10):2761–2779. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11269-012-0044-y
Heim RR. A Review of Twentieth-Century Drought Indices Used in the United States. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 2002;83(8):1149–1166.
Veeraputhiran R, Karthikeyan R, Lakshmi G, Selvaraju R, Singh SDS, Balasubramanian TN. Crop Planning Climate Atlas. (pp. 1-45) Coimbatore. Crop Planning Climate Atlas. A.E. Publications. 2003.
Smakhtin VU, Hughes DA. Automated Estimation and Analyses of Drought Indices in South Asia. International Water Management Institute. 2004.
IPCC (2007) Climate change, Fourth Assessment Report. Cambridge University Press.
Mallya G, Mishra V, Niyogi D, Tripathi S, Govindaraju RS. Trends and variability of droughts over the Indian monsoon region. Weather and Climate Extremes. 2016;12:43–68. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wace.2016.01.002
Cancelliere A, Mauro GD, Bonaccorso B, Rossi G. Drought forecasting using the Standardized Precipitation Index. Water Resources Management. 2007;21(5):801–819. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11269-006-9062-y
Lloyd-Hughes B, Saunders MA. A drought climatology for Europe. International Journal of Climatology. 2002;22(13):1571–1592. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/joc.846
Sathyamoorthy NK, Ramaraj AP, Dheebakaran GA, Arthirani B, Senthilraja K, Jagannathan R. Characterization of Rainfall and Length of Growing Period Over North Western Zone of Tamil Nadu. Indian Journal of Ecology. 2017;44(2):232–238.
Wu M. A Brief Introduction to Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) 2013.
Ramaraj AP, Kokilavani S, Manikandan N, Arthirani B, Rajalakshmi D. Rainfall Stability and Drought Valuation (Using Spi) Over Southern Zone of Tamil Nadu. Current World Environment. 2015;10(3):923–933. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.12944/cwe.10.3.23
Wilhite DA, Hayes MJ, Svoboda MD. Drought Monitoring and Assessment: Status and Trends in the United States. Drought and Drought Mitigation in Europe. 2000;p. 149–160.
Pai DS, Sridhar L, Guhathakurta P, Hatwar HR. District-wide drought climatology of the southwest monsoon season over India based on standardized precipitation index (SPI) Natural Hazards. 2011;59(3):1797–1813. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11069-011-9867-8
Mishra AK, Desai VR. Spatial and temporal drought analysis in the Kansabati river basin, India. International Journal of River Basin Management. 2005;3(1):31–41. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15715124.2005.9635243
Sathyamoorthy NK, Ramaraj AP, Senthilraja K, Swaminathan C, Jagannathan R. Exploring rainfall scenario of Periyar Vaigai Command area for crop planning. Indian Journal of Ecology. 2018;45(1):11–18.
Wilhite DA, Glantz MH. Understanding: the Drought Phenomenon: The Role of Definitions. Water International. 1985;10(3):111–120. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02508068508686328
Raziei T, Saghafian B, Paulo AA, Pereira LS, Bordi I. Spatial Patterns and Temporal Variability of Drought in Western Iran. Water Resources Management. 2009;23(3):439–455. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11269-008-9282-4
Zahid R, Arslan M, Ghauri B. SPI based spatial and temporal analysis of drought in Sindh province. Pakistan. Sci.Int.(Lahore). 2016;28(4):3893–3896.

Copyright

© 2019 Vinothkanna & 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