Spatiotemporal evolution of drought events and its contribution on vegetation growth in the river source region

Climate change has been proved to exacerbate drought events and further cause huge economic and ecological losses worldwide. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the long-term evolution characteristics of drought events and quantify the impact of drought events on typical ecological indexes. Based on the measured historical precipitation data, the standardized precipitation index of different time scales was extracted to measure water deficit. The leaf area index with wide range and high precision was generated based on the Modis remote sensing image and denoising processing to represent vegetation growth. Trend analysis and change point analysis were carried out to study the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of the concerned drought indexes. Then, with hypothesis test, appropriate copula multivariate analysis method was innovatively introduced to construct joint distribution of the standardized precipitation index and leaf area index. The contribution of drought on vegetation growth was expected to be quantified by deriving the conditional copula and preset marginal distributions. The upper Yangtze River where biomass is extremely sensitive to climate change was taken as a study area. The results show that drought events in this region have significant spatial heterogeneity. The leaf area index is highly influenced by the meteorological drought index. From no drought to severe drought, the vegetation index is distributed more and more toward the low value. Copula is very potential to find the inner relationship of the standardized precipitation index and leaf area index. The study is useful to deepen the understanding of the internal mechanism of drought events and discuss reasonable disaster prevention and mitigation countermeasures.