Santos, J.F.; Tadic, L.; Portela, M.M.; Espinosa, L.A.; Brleković, T. Drought Characterization in Croatia Using E-OBS Gridded Data. Water2023, 15, 3806.
Santos, J.F.; Tadic, L.; Portela, M.M.; Espinosa, L.A.; Brleković, T. Drought Characterization in Croatia Using E-OBS Gridded Data. Water 2023, 15, 3806.
Santos, J.F.; Tadic, L.; Portela, M.M.; Espinosa, L.A.; Brleković, T. Drought Characterization in Croatia Using E-OBS Gridded Data. Water2023, 15, 3806.
Santos, J.F.; Tadic, L.; Portela, M.M.; Espinosa, L.A.; Brleković, T. Drought Characterization in Croatia Using E-OBS Gridded Data. Water 2023, 15, 3806.
Abstract
Droughts are among the major natural hazards that are spreading to many parts of the world with huge multi-dimensional impacts. For Continental Croatia an extensive analysis of drought phenomenon is presented based on meteorological E-OBS gridded dataset (0.25° x 0.25°), within the period of 1950 to 2022. The drought events were characterized by the Standardized Precipita-tion Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) applied to different time-scales (6 and 12 months) in order to describe the subannual and annual variability of drought. The spatiotemporal patterns of drought are obtained through principal component analysis (PCA) and K-means clustering (KMC) applied to the SPEI field. An areal drought evolution analysis and the changes in the frequency of occur-rence of the periods under drought conditions were achieved by using a kernel occurrence rate es-timator (KORE). The Modified Mann-Kendall (MMK) test coupled with the Sen’s slope estimator test are applied to the SPEI series in order to quantify the drought trends throughout the country. According to drought events history and considering the different morphoclimatic characteristics of the study area the results showed that Croatia could be divided into three different and spatial-ly well-defined regions with specific temporal and spatial characteristics of droughts (Central North, Eastern and Southern regions). It is shown that there is a manifest increase in the percent-age of area affected by drought as well as in the yearly drought occurrences rates in both Central North and Eastern regions and an evident decrease in the Southern region for both 6 and 12 month SPEI time-scales. In the observation of the drought temporal characteristics, it was found that downward trends expressing increasing drought severities were strongly significant in North and Eastern regions while a few significant upward trends were seen in Southern region. From this study, it is possible to obtain a broader view of the historical behaviour of droughts in Croatia with results providing useful support for drought risk assessment and decision-making processes.
Keywords
Gridded dataset; Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI); Drought regionalization; Kernel occurrence rate estimator; Trend analysis; Climate indices
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Water Science and Technology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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