Comparing Palmer Drought Severity Index drought assessments using the traditional offline approach with direct climate model outputs

Yang, Yuting; Zhang, Shulei; Roderick, Michael L.; McVicar, Tim R.; Yang, Dawen; Liu, Wenbin; Li, Xiaoyan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2921-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2921-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2921-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 6

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

03 Jun 2020

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 03 Jun 2020

Comparing Palmer Drought Severity Index drought assessments using the traditional offline approach with direct climate model outputs

Yuting Yang, Shulei Zhang, Michael L. Roderick, Tim R. McVicar, Dawen Yang, Wenbin Liu, and Xiaoyan Li

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2921-2020-supplement

Data sets

CMIP5 project data Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip5/

Model code and software

zslthu/Calculate-PDSI-in-Matlab: Calculate-PDSI-in-Matlab (Version v1.0.0) zslthu https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3871420

Short summary

Many previous studies using offline drought indices report that future warming will increase worldwide drought. However, this contradicts observations/projections of vegetation greening and increased runoff. We resolved this paradox by re-calculating the same drought indices using direct climate model outputs and find no increase in future drought as the climate warms. We also find that accounting for the impact of CO₂ on plant transpiration avoids the previous overestimation of drought.