For a country like India whose economy is primarily dependent on agriculture and experiencing frequent drought episodes, is it enough to assess those drought conditions based on precipitation alone? That being the case, we used Multivariate Standardised Drought Index to analyze the historical drought conditions caused by simultaneous deficits in precipitation and soil moisture for 30 meteorological sub-divisions in India. Further, we present a country-wide multivariate drought atlas for India based on the severity-duration-frequency relationships.
The 2015 drought event in India had affected multiple sectors including reservoir levels, crop yields, and well-being of people. This drought event was deficient in both precipitation and soil moisture. Therefore, we used the developed multivariate drought atlas to analyze the rarity, spatial extent, and the historical context of the impactful 2015 drought. The 2015 drought atlas reveals that many regions in India experienced a rare drought with return periods greater than 100 years.
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