Wet-environment Evapotranspiration and Precipitation Standardized Index
(WEPSI) for drought assessment and monitoring
Abstract
Drought is a major threat to global agriculture and can trigger or
intensify food price increase and migration. Assessment and monitoring
are essential for proper drought management. Drought indices play a
fundamental task in this respect. This research introduces the
Wet-environment Evapotranspiration and Precipitation Standardized Index
(WEPSI) for drought assessment and monitoring. WEPSI is inspired by the
Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), in which
water supply and demand are incorporated into the drought index
calculation. WEPSI considers precipitation (P) for water supply and
wet-environment evapotranspiration (ETw) for water demand. We use an
asymmetric complementary relationship to calculate ETw using actual
(ETa) and potential evapotranspiration (ETp). WEPSI is tested in the
transboundary Lempa River basin located in the Central American dry
corridor. ETw is estimated based on evapotranspiration data calculated
using the Water Evaluation And Planning (WEAP) system hydrological
model. To investigate the performance of our introduced drought index,
we compare it with two well-known meteorological indices (Standardized
Precipitation Index and SPEI), together with a hydrological index
(Standardized Runoff Index), in terms of correlation and mutual
information (MI). We also compare drought calculated with WEPSI and
historical information, including crop cereal production and Oceanic
Niño Index (ONI) data. The results show that WEPSI has the highest
correlation and MI compared with the three other indices used. It is
also consistent with the records of crop cereal production and ONI.
These findings show that WEPSI can be applied for agricultural drought
assessments.