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Droughts are becoming the most expensive natural disasters in former Sudan and have exerted serious impacts on local economic development and ecological environment. The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding of the temporal and spatial variations of droughts by using the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) and to discuss their relevance to the changes of hydrological variables in Sudan. The analysis results show that 1) droughts start in the late 1960s in Sudan and severe droughts occur during the 1980s in different regions of Sudan-the annual precipitation and soil moisture also reveal the evidence that the droughts prevail since the late 1960s; 2) the greater negative soil moistures anomalies are found in central and southern Sudan during the rainy seasons while greater negative anomalies of precipitation occur only in central Sudan compared between 1969-2009 and 1948-68; 3) the precipitation recycling ratio averaged over 1948-2009 decreases from south to north and the percentage of local actual evapotranspiration to local precipitation in dry conditions is greater than that in wet conditions; and 4) the highest (second highest) correlations appear between soil moisture and precipitation (actual evapotranspiration) and the significant decreases in annual soil moisture are associated with the decrease of annual precipitation and the increase of annual temperature. This suggests that continuous droughts in Sudan are caused jointly by the decrease of precipitation and the increase of temperature in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent events across many regions around the world have shown that short-term droughts (i.e., daily or weekly) with sudden occurrence can lead to huge losses to a wide array of environmental and societal sectors. However, the most commonly used drought indices can only identify drought at the monthly scale. Here, we introduced a daily scale drought index, that is, the standardized antecedent precipitation evapotranspiration index (SAPEI) that utilizes precipitation and potential evapotranspiration and also considers the effect of early water balance on dry/wet conditions on the current day. The robustness of SAPEI is first assessed through comparison with two typical monthly indices [Palmer drought severity index (PDSI) and standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI)] and soil moisture, and then applied to tracking short-term droughts during 1961–2015 for the Pearl River basin in south China. It is demonstrated that SAPEI performs as well as SPEI/self-calibrating PDSI at the monthly scale but outperforms SPEI at the weekly scale. Moreover, SAPEI is capable of revealing daily drought conditions, fairly consistent with soil moisture changes. Results also show that many of the historical short-term droughts over the Pearl River basin have multiple peaks in terms of severity, affected area, and intensity. The daily scale SAPEI provides an effective way of exploring drought initiation, development, and decay, which could be conducive for decision-makers and stakeholders to make early and timely warnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]