Long-Term Drought Analysis and Hazard Assessment Using Sc-PDSI in the Punjab, Pakistan

Abstract

Drought is a hazard that has long term effect on ecosystem. For a developing country such as Pakistan which has limited resources, drought can have severe implications. This study aims to investigate drought return period in the Punjab where significant portion of livelihood of people depends on agriculture. Gumbel Analysis was used to generate drought hazard maps at various return periods including durations of 5, 10, 25, 50 and 100 years. The study utilizes gridded time series of events and calculates various return periods on each of the spatial instance, i.e. each pixel of gridded data to derive drought hazard maps at various return periods in fully automated way. Results reveal that many districts of the Southern Punjab are the most vulnerable to drought with different drought intensity (-3.5 ≤ Sc-PDSI ≤ -7). The research concludes that Gumbel analysis can be efficiently used to assess drought intensity at different return periods.