Ain Shams Engineering Journal (May 2022)
Modelling of meteorological drought in the foothills of Central Himalayas: A case study in Uttarakhand State, India
Abstract
In the present study, Meteorological Drought (MD) has been analyzed using India Meteorological Department (IMD) criteria, and Standardized Precipitation Index (PIStandard) in the foothills of central Himalayan region of Uttarakhand State, India. Rainfall time series at two weather stations, namely Pantnagar and Dehradun stations were selected. For the evaluation of PIStandard method, the moving sums of rainfall data were arranged in monthly time series at the time scales of 1, 3, 6, 12, and 24 months. The rainfall data were analyzed after sequencing it in a time series for testing the different statistical distributions including the Gamma distribution, Normal and Log-Normal distribution. As a result, the Gamma distribution was found most suitable for fitting based on Kolmogorov-Smirnov test at 5% level of significance. Since PIStandard applies the running sum of the rainfall values at different time scales of 1–24 months and more number of variables were used for statistical distributions. The short-term drought monitoring in month of PIStandard-1 and PIStandard-3 was done whereas, for the long-term drought monitoring PIStandard-12 and PIStandard-24 was used for management of water resources. This approach gave better valuation and monitoring of the meteorological drought. The finding is helpful to manage water including rainwater harvesting and water storage structure, irrigation scheduling and yielding the crop. Further, PIStandard were used to predict the drought and submergence conditionsin both stations as a ready reference at 3 or 12 month time scales. The information derived from investigation might be appropriate used for the rainwater harvesting along with proper planning and management of crop planning and water resource storage structure in the area of rainfed and/or drought categories affected by region under the study.
