Development of an integrated drought assessment model for drought monitoring: A case study in Anhui province, China

Drought is always triggered by long-term deficit of precipitation and extreme temperature, which had led to huge losses of the economy in China. But to what extent have we defined the drought scale in contrast to farmland, river basin, grassland, forests and other types of the underlying surface? It is a vital issue for improving the accuracy of drought monitoring model/system. This study focused on developing an integrated drought assessment model which can reveal the relatively reasonable true drought circumstances and improve the monitoring ability of professional drought monitoring operation system. The object-oriented method was merged into the drought monitoring model. In order to verify the accuracy of the integrated drought assessment model, the model was applied in the professional operated drought monitoring system of Anhui Province. The monitoring system can automatically serve the daily drought monitoring map which directly shows the spatial distribution and intruded area within 4 diverse drought levels. The monitoring results indicated Anhui Province has suffered a persistent drought since the second half of 2019. And the severe drought was released by effective precipitation during August 10-13, which was caused by Typhoon Lekima. Then the drought-prone region and drought severity were consistently increasing until the extensive precipitation process in the whole province during November 26-27. The real drought development and changing phases were accurately detected by the integrated drought assessment model. And the drought impact areas from the model were coincidence with the reported data from local government. Beside that, monitoring results were approved by the local professional personnel and experts for drought monitoring.