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Global Drought

Global Drought

The impacts of drought are associated with the costs and losses in areas of economic, social, or environmental areas directly or indirectly. Drought monitoring is essential to develop a good prediction system, mitigate losses caused by drought and to set up preparedness strategies. The APCC Global Drought Monitoring is based on the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI; McKee et al. 1993) maps for the last 1-month, 3-month, 6-month and 12-month periods using monthly precipitation at 2.5°x2.5° resolution. SPI between -1.0 to -1.49 indicates moderate drought, -1.5 to -2.0 severe drought, and less than -2.0 extreme drought conditions. The SPI is estimated by transforming the observed rainfall distribution for the recent 30 yrs, usually fitted to a Gamma distribution, into a standardized normal distribution on an equal probability basis (see Sohn et al. 2012a, 2012b for more details).

References
Sohn, S.-J., C.-Y. Tam, K. Ashok, and J.-B. Ahn, 2012a: Quantifying the reliability of precipitation datasets for monitoring large-scale East Asian precipitation variations. Int. J. Clim., DOI: 10.1002/joc.2380. Sohn, S.-J., C.-Y. Tam, and J.-B. Ahn, 2012b: Development of a multimodel-based seasonal prediction system for extreme droughts and floods: a case study for South Korea. Int. J. Clim., DOI: 10.1002/joc.3464.