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Climate change and human activities are two major driving forces affecting the hydrologic cycle, which further influence the stationarity of the hydrologic regime. Hydrological drought is a substantial negative deviation from the normal hydrologic conditions affected by these two phenomena. In this study, we propose a framework for quantifying the effects of climate change and human activities on hydrological drought. First, trend analysis and change‐point test are performed to determine variations of hydrological variables. After that, the fixed runoff threshold level method (TLM) and the standardized runoff index (SRI) are used to verify whether the traditional assessment methods for hydrological drought are applicable in a changing environment. Finally, two improved drought assessment methods, the variable TLM and the SRI based on parameter transplantation are employed to quantify the impacts of climate change and human activities on hydrological drought based on the reconstructed natural runoff series obtained using the variable infiltration capacity hydrologic model. The results of a case study on the typical semiarid Laohahe basin in North China show that the stationarity of the hydrological processes in the basin is destroyed by human activities (an obvious change‐point for runoff series is identified in 1979). The traditional hydrological drought assessment methods can no longer be applied to the period of 1980–2015. In contrast, the proposed separation framework is able to quantify the contributions of climate change and human activities to hydrological drought during the above period. Their ranges of contributions to hydrological drought calculated by the variable TLM method are 20.6–41.2% and 58.8–79.4%, and the results determined by the SRI based on parameter transplantation method are 15.3–45.3% and 54.7–84.7%, respectively. It is concluded that human activities have a dominant effect on hydrological drought in the study region. The novelty of the study is twofold. First, the proposed method is demonstrated to be efficient in quantifying the effects of climate change and human activities on hydrological drought. Second, the findings of this study can be used for hydrological drought assessment and water resource management in water‐stressed regions under nonstationary conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research which investigated the alterations of the water levels across the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in China. The alterations were examined using a range of variability approach (RVA) based on a monthly water level datasets taken from 17 gauging stations. Researchers revealed that changes in hypsography resulting to substantial hydrologic alternations were due to extensive and intensive human activities. Results demonstrated that river channels characterized by altered water levels are those that have highly intensive sand dredging.

Droughts are one of the normal and recurrent climatic phenomena on Earth. However, recurring prolonged droughts have caused far-reaching and diverse impacts because of water deficits. This study aims to investigate the hydrological droughts of the Yellow River in northern China. Since drought duration and drought severity exhibit significant correlation, a bivariate distribution is used to model the drought duration and severity jointly. However. drought duration and drought severity are often modelled by different distributions; the commonly used bivariate distributions cannot be applied. In this study, a copula is employed to construct the bivariate drought distribution. The copula is a function that links the univariate marginal distributions to form the bivariate distribution. The bivariate return periods are also established to explore the drought characteristics of the historically noticeable droughts. The results show that the return period of the drought that occurred in late 1920s to early 1930s is 105 years. The significant 1997 dry-up phenomenon that occurred in the downstream Yellow River (resulting from the 1997-1998 drought) only has a return period of 4.4 years and is probably induced by two successive droughts and deteriorated by other factors, such as human activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]