Drought severity assessment

Background

The interest in drought severity assessment dates from when I joined a regional water authority at the start of 1976: a famous drought year in Britain. Whilst majoring on flood risk estimation for so long, my thinking on drought severity assessment lurched forward only in occasional steps. Some of these are evident from the legacy part of my website.

Progress

The paper to the CIWEM Centenary Conference (Reed, 1995b) provided the bones of a solution. It was built around a simple simulation that interprets the significance of the rainfall drought to the water-resource system. A distracting interest was the large spatial footprint of drought and the likelihood that water resources are under pressure regionally or even nationally.

More recent progress is reported in Reed (2015a) and Reed (2015b). Using long-term rainfall data from 38 sites in Great Britain and Ireland, there is now a rigorous framework for the assessment of drought severity from monthly rainfall data. The visualisation of drought severity is illustrated in Reed (2016) for evolution of the 1976 drought at Oxford.

Few take notice of R&D until a new procedure is delivered as a point and click application. This is now the focus of development. It seemed appropriate to update the DWRconsult website first, since this is likely where the new software will be delivered. Watch this space!