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Abstract Analyzing gradual trends in meteorological drought has become increasingly important as anthropogenic climate change and natural climate variability interact to complicate measurement of drought severity. Complex seasonality and long-term trends pose a limitation in understanding spatial trends in nonstationary changes of meteorological drought in the United States. This study seeks to address this issue by simultaneously analyzing recurring seasonal patterns (stationary component) and long-term drought trends (nonstationary component), with a unique focus on nonlinear trends and common regional patterns. We analyzed 696 instrumental precipitation gauges with long historical records in the continental United States, using a novel spline-based model to disaggregate a 3-month meteorological drought index (SPI) into its seasonal and long-term components. The disaggregated components for each gauge were then clustered into subregions with similar seasonality and groupings with similar long-term trends using a two-step process. Our results identify clearly defined regions based on precipitation seasonality, while long-term trends are not spatially coherent with the seasonality. Instead, these findings support prior findings of an increasingly drier western United States and an increasingly wetter eastern United States over the last century, but with more nuanced spatial and temporal patterns. The new clustering analysis based on nonstationary meteorological drought trends can contribute to informing and adapting current water management strategies to long-term drought trends. Significance Statement This study considered 656 precipitation gauges across the continental United States to find regions with similar precipitation seasonality and then to group records with similar long-term climate trends. The study focused on 3-month average precipitation, a key indicator for drought monitoring. We identified eight regions across the United States with similar precipitation seasonality. From 1920 to the present, we found continuous drying trends throughout the western United States, continuously wetter trends in the northern plains, and an overall wetter trend interrupted by a midcentury dry period (1930–50) for much of the central Plains and Midwest. This study’s use of splines, or fitted curves, allowed these nonlinear patterns, which we believe better capture the nuances and intensification of climate change effects on precipitation.
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A Nonstationary Standardized Precipitation Index (NSPI) Using Bayesian Splines
Abstract The standardized precipitation index (SPI) measures meteorological drought relative to historical climatology by normalizing accumulated precipitation. Longer record lengths improve parameter estimates, but these longer records may include signals of anthropogenic climate change and multidecadal natural climate fluctuations. Historically, climate nonstationarity has either been ignored or incorporated into the SPI using a quasi-stationary reference period, such as the WMO 30-yr period. This study introduces and evaluates a novel nonstationary SPI model based on Bayesian splines, designed to both improve parameter estimates for stationary climates and to explicitly incorporate nonstationarity. Using synthetically generated precipitation, this study directly compares the proposed Bayesian SPI model with existing SPI approaches based on maximum likelihood estimation for stationary and nonstationary climates. The proposed model not only reproduced the performance of existing SPI models but improved upon them in several key areas: reducing parameter uncertainty and noise, simultaneously modeling the likelihood of zero and positive precipitation, and capturing nonlinear trends and seasonal shifts across all parameters. Further, the fully Bayesian approach ensures all parameters have uncertainty estimates, including zero precipitation likelihood. The study notes that the zero precipitation parameter is too sensitive and could be improved in future iterations. The study concludes with an application of the proposed Bayesian nonstationary SPI model for nine gauges across a range of hydroclimate zones in the United States. Results of this experiment show that the model is stable and reproduces nonstationary patterns identified in prior studies, while also indicating new findings, particularly for the shape and zero precipitation parameters. Significance StatementWe typically measure how bad a drought is by comparing it with the historical record. With long-term changes in climate or other factors, however, a typical drought today may not have been typical in the recent past. The purpose of this study is to build a model that measures drought relative to a changing climate. Our results confirm that the model is accurate and captures previously noted climate change patterns—a drier western United States, a wetter eastern United States, earlier summer weather, and more extreme wet seasons. This is significant because this model can improve drought measurement and identify recent changes in drought.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2002539
- PAR ID:
- 10374418
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Meteorological Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology
- Volume:
- 61
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 1558-8424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 761-779
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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