5. Summary and conclusions
Drought is a natural hazard that can have large impacts on various
sectors of society, the environment and the economy. Within the
context of future climate change, it is important for decision makers to
comprehensively understand climate change impacts on all types of
droughts (meteorological, agricultural, and hydrologic) at the regional
scale and to map out and coordinate adaptation and mitigation strategies
for these droughts. In this study, daily time series of soil moisture
and runoffwere examined on a 0.5 degree grid by driving the calibrated
VIC model with downscaled/bias-corrected climate projections. On the
time series of precipitation, and modeled soil moisture and runoff, the
properties of droughts occurring in different parts of the hydrological
cyclewere comprehensively examined in a spatially consistent manner.
The drought characteristics taken into account were the number of
droughts, drought duration, and a standardized deficit volume (drought
intensity) based on a standardized index for three types of droughts,
meteorological, agricultural and hydrological. The major findings of
this study can be summarized as follows.
For China as a whole, changes in drought severity, duration, and
frequency suggest that meteorological, agricultural and hydrological
droughts will become more severe, prolonged, and frequent in the
near future. However, regional variations are large. Model results for