长江中下游地区气象干旱特征

Research on meteorological drought in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River

长江中下游地区是中国重要的粮食生产基地,在当前全球气候变化的背景下,旱灾将直接影响该区域人民的生产生活和国家粮食安全。基于标准化降水指数(SPI),采用1961-2015年的中国地面降水月值0.5°×0.5°格点数据集,通过游程理论定义气象干旱事件,并获取了描述干旱事件特征的三个变量:干旱历时、干旱烈度和烈度峰值。指数函数和伽马函数分别用来拟合干旱历时和干旱烈度的边缘分布,Clayton Copula函数用来构建干旱历时和干旱烈度的联合分布。在此基础上,分别用常规单变量和基于Copula双变量的频率分析方法探讨55年来长江中下游地区干旱事件在不同时间尺度下的空间特征。结果表明:(1)不同时间尺度下,长江中下游地区的干旱特征空间格局存在一定的差异,最严重的干旱主要发生在长江下游地区;(2)不同时间尺度的干旱历时和干旱烈度均呈正相关,即较严重的干旱事件通常持续更长的时间;(3)鄱阳湖流域和长江干流下游的北部干旱风险较高,而陕西南部、河南南部、湖北大部和湖南的中北部干旱风险较低。研究结果可为长江中下游地区水资源的科学管理和干旱灾害的风险评估提供理论依据。

The middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River serves as an important grain production base in China. In the context of global climate change, the drought events will directly affect the agriculture production and people’s properties and lives in this region and also the national food security. In this study, the meteorological drought events have been extracted using run theory based on the standardized precipitation index(SPI), which is defined using the gridded dataset of monthly precipitation with a spatial resolution of 0.5° × 0.5° in China from 1961 to 2015. The drought events are characterized by three variables including duration, severity and peak. Exponential and Gamma functions are then selected to describe the marginal distribution of drought duration and severity, respectively. The Clayton Copula is used to construct the joint distribution of drought duration and severity. Based on the above functions, conventional univariate frequency analysis and copula-based bivariate frequency analysis are used to characterize the spatial patterns of the drought events in the study area at various time scales over the past 55 years. While univariate analysis is focused on return levels of selected return periods(5-, 10-, 20-, and 30-year) for the SPI of 3-, 6-, and 12-month time scales, the bivariate analysis is focused on the joint occurrence probabilities P1 and P2 of drought duration and severity, where P1 is the probability of 'drought duration and severity' exceeding their respective thresholds at the same time and P2 is the probability of 'drought duration or severity' exceeding their respective thresholds at the same time. Here, the thresholds denote the duration and severity values corresponding to selected 5-, 10-, 20-and 30-year return periods. The results show that:(1) There are some differences between the spatial patterns of drought characteristics for the 3-month, 6-month, 12-month time scales in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, and the most serious droughts mainly occur in the lower reaches of the river.(2) Both drought duration and severity are positively correlated at various time scales, that is, the areas with higher drought severity are also associated with longer drought duration and vice versa.(3) Poyang Lake watershed and areas north of the lower Yangtze River are associated with larger values of the joint occurrence probability P1,that is, when the drought duration and severity exceed their corresponding 5, 10, 20 and 30-year return values at the same time, while smaller values of the joint occurrence probability P1 are noted for Southern Shaanxi, Southern Henan, a major portion of Hubei and central-north of Hunan, suggesting a low risk of droughts in these areas. The results of this study can provide theoretical basis for scientific managements of water resource and the risk assessments of drought disaster in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River.