A Novel Multi-Scalar Drought Index for Monitoring Drought: the Standardized Precipitation Temperature Index

Nowadays human beings are facing many environmental challenges because of frequently occurring drought hazards. Several adverse impacts of drought hazard are continued in many parts of the world. Drought has a substantial influence on water resources and irrigation. It may effect on the country’s environment, communities, and industries. Therefore, it is important to improve drought monitoring system. In this paper, we proposed a novel method – Standardized Precipitation Temperature Index (SPTI) for drought monitoring that utilize the regional tempreature. We compared the performance of our proposed drought index – SPTI with commonly used drought indices (i.e., Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI)) for 17 meteorological stations of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province (Pakistan) that have both extreme (arid and humid) climatic environment. We found that SPTI is strongly correlated with SPI and performed better than SPEI in low temperature regions for drought monitoring. In summary, SPTI is recommended for detecting and monitoring the drought conditions over different time scales.