Journal article
A self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index
Journal of climate, Vol.17(12), pp.2335-2351
2004
DOI: 10.1175/1520-0442(2004)017<2335:ASPDSI>2.0.CO;2
Abstract
The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) has been used for more than 30 years to quantify the long-term drought conditions for a given location and time. However, a common critique of the PDSI is that the behavior of the index at various locations is inconsistent, making spatial comparisons of PDSI values difficult, if not meaningless. A self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (SC-PDSI) is presented and evaluated. The SC-PDSI automatically calibrates the behavior of the index at any location by replacing empirical constants in the index computation with dynamically calculated values. An evaluation of the SC-PDSI at 761 sites within Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nonh Dakota, and South Dakota, as well as at all 344 climate divisions shows that it is more spatially comparable than the PDSI, and reports extreme wet and dry conditions with frequencies that would be expected for rare conditions. © 2004 American Meteorological Society.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- A self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index
- Creators
- Nathan Wells - University of Nebraska–LincolnSteve Goddard - University of Nebraska–LincolnMichael J Hayes - University of Nebraska–Lincoln
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of climate, Vol.17(12), pp.2335-2351
- DOI
- 10.1175/1520-0442(2004)017<2335:ASPDSI>2.0.CO;2
- ISSN
- 0894-8755
- eISSN
- 1520-0442
- Publisher
- American Meteorological Society
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2004
- Academic Unit
- Computer Science
- Record Identifier
- 9984259463202771
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