Comparison of meteorological, hydrological and agricultural droughts for developing a composite drought index over semi-arid Banas River Basin of India

This study attempts to develop a composite index by integrating meteorological, hydrological and agricultural droughts over semi-arid Banas River basin, Rajasthan, India. To affect this, the standardized precipitation index (SPI), streamflow drought index (SDI), and vegetation condition index (VCI) have been used at 1-, 3-, 5-, 9- and 12-month time scales using station and remote sensing-based data for the period 2000 to 2020. To identify the occurrence of above-stated droughts and most vulnerable drought period at different time scales (1-, 3-, 5-, 9- and 12-month) regarding SPI, SDI and VCI has been validated with foodgrains produced and occurrence of historical drought years. This validation has been found significant with SPI-3 (r = − 0.81), SDI-3 (r = − 0.78) and VCI-5 (r = − 0.80) time scales. Subsequently, these time scales have been coalesced using weights obtained from principal component analysis (PCA) to develop the composite drought index (CDI). The annual CDI developed this way has been further validated with foodgrains produced and occurrence of historical drought years. The results of CDI demonstrate the maximum area under mild drought (73 percent) followed by moderate (21 percent) and severe (4 percent), whereas minuscule area has been detected under wet conditions (2 percent). Finally, this study suggests that individual drought types (meteorological, hydrological, agricultural) do not appropriately arrest the drought severity, hence, the usage of multiple droughts based composite index can be more realistic for effective drought assessment and monitoring in hydrologic systems.