Soil Moisture Drought in China, 1950–2006

AbstractFour physically based land surface hydrology models driven by a common observation-based 3-hourly meteorological dataset were used to simulate soil moisture over China for the period 1950–2006. Monthly values of total column soil moisture from the simulations were converted to percentiles and an ensemble method was applied to combine all model simulations into a multimodel ensemble from which agricultural drought severities and durations were estimated. A cluster analysis method and severity–area–duration (SAD) algorithm were applied to the soil moisture data to characterize drought spatial and temporal variability. For drought areas greater than 150 000 km2 and durations longer than 3 months, a total of 76 droughts were identified during the 1950–2006 period. The duration of 50 of these droughts was less than 6 months. The five most prominent droughts, in terms of spatial extent and then duration, were identified. Of these, the drought of 1997–2003 was the most severe, accounting for the majority...

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