Daily standardized precipitation index with multiple time scale for monitoring water deficit across the mainland China from 1961 to 2018

Abstract

Abstract. With the increasing shortage of water resources, drought has become one of the hot issues in the world. The standardized precipitation index (SPI) is one of the widely used drought assessment indicators because of its simple and effective calculation method, but it can only assess drought events more than one month. We developed a new multi-scale daily SPI dataset to make up for the shortcomings of the commonly used SPI and meet the needs of drought types at different time scales. Taking three typical stations in Henan, Yunnan and Fujian Province as examples, the drought events identified by SPI with different scales were consistent with the historical drought events recorded. Meanwhile, we took the 3-month scale SPI of soil and agricultural drought as an example, and analyzed the characteristics of drought events in 484 stations in Chinese mainland. The results showed that most of the drought events the mainland China did not increase significantly, and some parts of the northwestern Xinjiang and Northeast China showed signs of gradual relief. In short, our daily SPI data set is freely available to the public on the website https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14135144 , and can effectively capture drought events of different scales. It can also meet the needs of drought research in different fields such as meteorology, hydrology, agriculture, social economy, etc.