Construction and application of comprehensive drought index based on uncertainty cloud reasoning algorithm

The establishment of comprehensive drought index is a fundamental task for the analysis of drought hazard system evolution. To fully explore the characteristics of drought variation process, the cloud uncertainty reasoning method was applied to construct comprehensive drought index integrating precipitation with soil moisture indicators. The application results of the proposed drought index in Anhui Province, China revealed that, (1) The overall drought evolution presented significant intensifying trend with the drought occurrence frequency increasing from 32% to 41% from south to north in Anhui Province, and the primary drought type in the northern area was moderate-level drought events and above, while the drought type in the central and southern region was dominated by light-level drought events. (2) Autumn drought was the dominant type from 1960 to 2007 in Anhui Province, with the average drought occurrence frequency of 40%. In addition, the evolution of spring and autumn drought all presented intensifying trends from 1960 to 2007, while the summer and winter drought evolution trends were opposite. (3) The Mann-Kendall trend test results revealed that the drought evolution presented evidently intensifying trend from August 1967 to February 1969, but slight declining trend from May 1974 to August 1978, July 1989 to August 2001 and February 2003 to December 2007, and the mutation of drought evolution occurred in November 1972, February 1978 and August 1998, etc. The above results were basically consistent with the historical statistics, indicating that the proposed comprehensive drought index and its construction framework were reliable, which can be further applied in the related research field of regional drought risk management.