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Drought termination: concept and characterisation
journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-09, 09:04 authored by Simon Parry, Christel Prudhomme, Robert WilbyRobert Wilby, Paul WoodPaul WoodThere are numerous anecdotal examples of drought terminations documented throughout the historical record on most continents. The end of a drought is the critical time during which water resource managers
urgently require information on the replenishment of supplies. Yet this phase has been relatively neglected by the academic
community, with much of the existing body of research on drought termination assessing
the likelihood of droughts ending rather than its temporal profile. In particular, there has been little effort to characterise drought termination events themselves. This is partly explained by existing definitions of drought termination as a specific point in time when drought is considered to have finished, rather than a more holistic consideration based on approaches developed within biological sciences. There is also a lack of understanding about how drought termination propagates through the
hydrological cycle. This paper specifically examines and reviews available research on drought termination, highlighting limitations associated with current definitions and offering suggestions for characterising the temporal stages of drought. An alternative definition of drought termination is proposed: a period between the maximum negative anomaly and a return to above average conditions. Once this phase has been delineated, the
duration, rate and seasonality of drought termination can be derived. The utility of these metrics is illustrated through a case study of the 2010-12 drought in the United Kingdom, and the propagation of drought termination between river flows and groundwater levels.
Funding
This research was funded through the Learning & Development programme at the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
Progress in Physical Geography: an international review of geographical work in the natural and environmental sciencesCitation
PARRY, S. ...et al., 2016. Drought termination: concept and characterisation. Progress in Physical Geography: an international review of geographical work in the natural and environmental sciences, 40(4), pp.743-767.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Acceptance date
2016-04-30Publication date
2016Notes
This is an open access article published by Sage and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 3.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ISSN
0309-1333eISSN
1477-0296Publisher version
Language
- en