Sciences Hydrological response to different time scales of….pdfVIP

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 9, 523–533, 2005 Hydrology and /EGU/hess/hess/9/523/ SRef-ID: 1607-7938/hess/2005-9-523 Earth System European Geosciences Union Sciences Hydrological response to different time scales of climatological drought: an evaluation of the Standardized Precipitation Index in a mountainous Mediterranean basin 1,2 ´ 1 S. M. Vicente-Serrano and J. I. Lopez-Moreno 1 ´ Instituto Pirenaico de Ecologıa, CSIC (Spanish Research Council), Campus de Aula Dei, P.O. Box 202, Zaragoza 50 080, Spain 2Unit for Landscape Modelling, University of Cambridge, Sir William Hardy Building, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge, CB2 1QB, UK Received: 3 June 2005 – Published in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions: 28 July 2005 Revised: 4 October 2005 – Accepted: 7 October 2005 – Published: 7 November 2005 Abstract. At present, the Standardized Precipitation Index 1 Introduction (SPI) is the most widely used drought index to provide good estimations about the intensity, magnitude and spatial extent Drought is one of the main natural hazards affecting the of droughts. The main advantage of the SPI in comparison economy and the environment of large areas (Obasi, 1994; with other indices is the fact that the SPI enables both deter- Bruce, 1994; Wilhite, 2000). Droughts cause crop losses mination of drought conditions at different time scales and (Austin et al. 1998; Leilah and Al-Khateb, 2005), ur- monitoring of different drought types. It is widely accepted ban water supply shortages (De Gaeta