Assessment of Two Different Methods in Predicting Hydrological Drought from the Perspective of Water Demand

The traditional methodologies to determine hydrologic drought use standardized drought indexes, which do not express a drought’s severity in terms of the volume deficit and do not consider water demand as a component of its calculation. To overcome these disadvantages, this work presents a method fo...

Full description

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Water resources management Vol. 33; no. 5; pp. 1851 - 1865
Main Authors:	de Medeiros, Giovana Cristina Santos, Maia, Adelena Gonçalves, de Medeiros, Joana Darc Freire
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01-03-2019 Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:	Atmospheric Sciences Civil Engineering Demand Drought Drought index Duration Earth and Environmental Science Earth Sciences Environment Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences Hydrogeology Hydrology Hydrology/Water Resources Methods Reservoirs River basins Rivers Storage capacity Storage conditions Water demand Water resources Water resources management Water storage Water use Water shortage Threshold level method Semiarid Water resources
Online Access:	Get full text
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

Description
Summary:	The traditional methodologies to determine hydrologic drought use standardized drought indexes, which do not express a drought’s severity in terms of the volume deficit and do not consider water demand as a component of its calculation. To overcome these disadvantages, this work presents a method for the assessment of hydrological drought that determines the volume of water below its demand. A drought can be characterized by its duration, severity and magnitude, using the Threshold Level Method. Complementarily, the method for the assessment of hydrological drought developed by Araújo and Bronstert ( 2016 ) was used to compare the characteristics of drought events in the same reservoirs. For this purpose, the droughts that occurred between 1997 and 2015 were studied in two reservoirs in the Piranhas-Açu River basin (Brazil). For both methodologies, the results showed that the reservoir with a higher storage capacity is more efficient and, thus, less susceptible to drought than the smaller. It was found that the basic difference between the two approaches is the time analysis of drought events: while the Threshold Level Method makes it possible to study what occurred in the past to diagnose and plan the use of water in the future, the other method enables the assessment of current conditions to anticipate the start of a hydrologic drought. It is suggested that the two methodologies presented can be used simultaneously by water resource managers to enable a more comprehensive analysis of drought events in the basin.
ISSN:	0920-4741 1573-1650
DOI:	10.1007/s11269-019-02218-7