Abstract
It remains unclear how drought is varying under climatic change. Quantifying the relationship between drought and climatic factors is crucial for predicting future drought risk under global climatic change. Correlations of annual drought severity index (DSI) with climatic factors were examined from 2000 to 2011 on the Tibetan Plateau. Spatially averaged DSI increased with increasing precipitation and minimum relative humidity, but decreased with increasing sunshine. The degrees of correlation between DSI and climatic factors varied with vegetation types. The change magnitude of DSI decreased with increasing temperature, precipitation and vapor pressure, but increased with increasing wind speed and sunshine. Therefore, clarifying the correlation between drought and climatic change need consider ecosystem types and their local climate on the Tibetan Plateau.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Data Sharing Infrastructure of Earth System Science in China and the China Meteorological Data Sharing Service System for providing vegetation type maps and climatic data, respectively. This work was supported by the National Key Research Projects of China [Nos. 2017YFA0604801; 2016YFC0502006], National Natural Science Foundation of China [Nos. 31600432, 41571042, 41761008], the Science and Technology Plan Projects of Tibet Autonomous Region (Forage Grass Industry) and Youth Innovation Research Team Project of Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling (LENOM2016Q0002).