Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Spatially explicit, wall-to-wall rainfall data provide foundational climatic information but alone are inadequate for characterizing meteorological, hydrological, agricultural, or ecological drought. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is one of the most widely used indicators of drought and defines localized conditions of both drought and excess rainfall based on period-specific (e.g., 1-month, 6-month, 12-month) accumulated precipitation relative to multi-year averages. A 93-year (1920–2012), high-resolution (250 m) gridded dataset of monthly rainfall available for the State of Hawai‘i was used to derive gridded, monthly SPI values for 1-, 3-, 6-, 9-, 12-, 24-, 36-, 48-, and 60-month intervals. Gridded SPI data were validated against independent, station-based calculations of SPI provided by the National Weather Service. The gridded SPI product was also compared with the U.S. Drought Monitor during the overlapping period. This SPI product provides several advantages over currently available drought indices for Hawai‘i in that it has statewide coverage over a long historical period at high spatial resolution to capture fine-scale climatic gradients and monitor changes in local drought severity.
Publication Title
Data
Publication Date
12-1-2020
Volume
5
Issue
4
First Page
1
Last Page
9
ISSN
2306-5729
DOI
10.3390/data5040109
Keywords
climate, drought, gridded data, Hawai‘i, rainfall, Standardized Precipitation Index
Repository Citation
Lucas, Matthew P.; Trauernicht, Clay; Frazier, Abby G.; and Miura, Tomoaki, "Long-term, gridded standardized precipitation index for Hawai‘i" (2020). Geography. 9.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/9
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.