A Self-Calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index

The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) has been used for more than 30 years to quantify the long-term drought conditions for a given location and time. However, a common critique of the PDSI is that the behavior of the index at various locations is inconsistent, making spatial comparisons of PDSI values difficult, if not meaningless. A self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (SC-PDSI) is presented and evaluated. The SC-PDSI automatically calibrates the behavior of the index at any location by replacing empirical constants in the index computation with dynamically calculated values. An evaluation of the SC-PDSI at 761 sites within Nebraska,

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: EIA-0091530, 0091530
• UD
  U.S. Department of Agriculture