Comparison of two drought indices in studying regional meteorological drought events in China

The composite-drought index (CI), improved weighted average of precipitation index (IWAP), and the objective identification technique for regional extreme events (OITREE) were employed to detect China's regional meteorological drought events (CRMDEs) during 1961–2010. Compared with existing references, CI and IWAP both showed strong ability in identifying CRMDEs. Generally, the results of CI and IWAP were consistent, especially for extreme and severe CRMDEs. During 1961–2010, although the frequencies of extreme and severe CRMDEs based on CI and IWAP both showed weak decreasing trends, the two mean-integrated indices both showed increasing but not significant trends. However, the results of IWAP were more reasonable than CI’s in two aspects. Firstly, the monthly frequency of extreme and severe CRMDEs based on IWAP showed a clear seasonal variation, which coincided with the seasonal variation of the East Asian monsoon over central–eastern China, whereas the frequency based on CI presented a much weaker seasonal variation. Secondly, the two sets of results were sometimes inconsistent with respect to the start and end times of a CRMDE, and CRMDEs based on CI generally showed two unreasonable phenomena: (1) under non-drought conditions, a severe drought stage could suddenly occur in a large area; and (2) during the following period, drought could alleviate gradually in cases of non-precipitation. Comparative analysis suggested that the IWAP drought index possesses obvious advantages in detecting and monitoring regional drought events.