The Dry Spell

The Dry Spell

The Dry Spell >> https://urluso.com/2sXNQv

The best way to irrigate plants is to gently soak the soil with the prescribed amount of water in one application. This deep watering encourages deeper root growth, which in turn will be better able to withstand dry spells. Frequent shallow watering, on the other hand, encourages shallow roots, which are more likely to succumb to heat and drying of the topsoil. Sandy soil and container plants need more frequent irrigation.

While minor cases of leaf scorch and leaf drop are not terribly harmful to the plant, prolonged lack of moisture can spell disaster for landscape plants. Young and newly established plants are most susceptible to the dry conditions, but even established plants may reach a critical point during prolonged drought. Branch and root dieback make plants more susceptible to winter injury. Plants already stressed by other factors may succumb to severely dry soils.

Dry spell length (DSL), consecutive non-rainy days between two precipitation events, play an important role in regulating soil moisture dynamics, terrestrial energy exchange as well as vegetation growth. According to the Clausius-Clapeyron (C-C) relationship, global warming can result in prolonged DSL. However, usually the amount of precipitation and its characteristics coincidentally varied with the changes of DSL under global warming, it remains unclear how the inter-annual variation of precipitation interacts with the evolution of dry spells. In this study, the global long-term in-situ observation data set of daily precipitation during 1976-2019 was used to examine the spatiotemporal trends of growing season DSL and precipitation. Our results showed that the global mean growing season DSL significantly increased by 0.3 days decade-1 during 1976-1998 while no significant trend of that was observed during 1999-2019. In contrast, the growing season precipitation (Prec_GS) showed no significant trend in 1976-1998 whereas significant increase trend of that was observed in 1999-2019. To explore the impacts of precipitation on the evolution of dry spells, we examined the relationship between the growing season DSL and Prec_GS. We found that prevalent negative relationship was observed between growing season DSL and Prec_GS in 88% and 86% stations during the period of 1976-1998 and 1999-2019, respectively. Spatially, the mean annual Prec_GS and DSL showed significantly negative relationship, that is, the stations with more precipitation showed shorter DSL in growing season, and vice versa. The changes of mean annual Prec_GS explained 81% spatial variation of growing season DSL. Moreover, during the period of 1999-2019 significant increase of precipitation frequency and decrease of dry day frequency were also observed in addition to the increase of Prec_GS in this period. The decreased dry day frequency further resulted in the decrease of growing season DSL. By excluded the impacts of precipitation, the DSL/Prec_GS ratio showed significant decreasing trend during 1999-2019. Our study suggested that the spatiotemporal variations of DSL were modulated by the variation of precipitation. The impacts of precipitation changes on ecosystem by altering the dry spell evolution should be considered in modeling the terrestrial carbon and hydrological cycling in response to climate changes.

One form of drought is the interruption of the rainy season by a so called dry spell. Dry spell can be defined as a sequence of dry days including days with less than a threshold value of rainfall. The analysis of the historical occurrence of droughts and its probability of recurrence is important. This information is extremely useful for planning and design applications in agriculture and environment and many other sectors. Drought is perceived as a two-dimensional phenomenon (intensity and duration) witch is integrated on a spatial basis (regional drought). The two basic dimensions (intensity and duration) require that bivariate frequency analysis is required for linking return periods to both dimensions levels. This approach should be considered as an intermediate step towards a more comprehensive approach, which is related to anticipate damages of specific sectors.

In the wet-dry spell approach, the time-axis is split up into intervals called wet periods and dry periods (Figure 2). A rainfall event is an interval in which it rains continuously (it is an uninterrupted sequence of wet periods). The definition of event is associated with a rainfall threshold value which defines wet. The limit 4 mm day-1 has been selected because it corresponds to the average daily evapotranspiration in the area. This amount of water corresponds approximately to the expected daily evaporation rate, thus marking the lowest physical limit for considering rainfall that may produce utilizable surface water resources during the rainy season which lasts from September to April [8, 11]. In this approach, the process of rainfall occurrences is specified by the probability laws of the length of the wet periods (storm duration), and the length of the dry periods (time between storms or inter-event time).

For planning purposes, the longest dry spells associated with different return periods are of fundamental importance. These values were obtained by modelling this process by GEV (General Extreme Value distributions) distributions which shows the best fit (Figure 4 and 5). Table 3 shows the estimated duration of extreme dry events obtained. From table 3 a few rainy seasons characterized by a favourable distribution of rainfall can hide the statistics fact that for a statistical recurrence period of one year, may it produce at least one of more than 20 days (rain gauges of Frétissa and Sidi Abdel Basset). This can be justified by low altitude and unfavourable exposure to rain for these stations (opposite the prevailing wind north-west) and a low annual rainfall in the two rain gauges. For the median the values obtained are critical, the duration of the extreme dry event is almost or more 30 days for all rain gauges; about 4 decades in the Frétissa rain gauge (35 days). For a hundred-year recurrence period, a longest dry spells up to 71.5 days may be registered at Sidi Abdel Basset rain gauge of low average annual rainfall (450 mm).

To analyze the severity of extreme dry events, the central part of the rainy season for the period from December to March was chosen. Dry events occurring in the core of the rainy season were identified as those ending within the timespan of December - March. Thus any dry event resulting from a rain of start or end of rainy season is not counted. It is important to examine the occurrence of these longest dry spells, during the central part of the rainy season and the whole season, for different return periods. The exceedance probability Pe (N), that an extreme long dry event would occur at least once within a given statistical recurrence period of T years must be equal to the reciprocal value of the product λT:

where denotes the expected number of dry events/year (season). λT specifies the expected number of trials needed to observe at least once the extreme duration of N days associated with the return period of T years. The length of the extreme dry spell N can then be obtained from the cumulative negative binomial pdf:

By focusing on the dry spell event, the duration of the rainfall event Dn,m will in fact be identified as inter-event time. This change of roles fits the original Poisson model better. Since rainfall events are shorter, their duration follows the geometrical pdf, as theoretically required. The analysis show that approximately, 50 % of the events indeed last at most one day, the persistence of uninterrupted sequences of rainy days sometimes lasting beyond two weeks (the maximum observed duration is 17 days) (table 5). However the frequency of such long-duration events decreases rapidly with increasing duration. The empirical and fitted geometric pdf of event duration at the Ghézala-dam rain gauge are displayed in Figure 7.

This case study, using rainfall records of the Ichkeul basin, illustrates the independency between the durations of wet and dry events. It is shown that dry spells occur randomly during the rainy season. In this region dry spells can well be described by the negative binomial pdf. The procedure defines the inter-event time as being the dry event period. For the rainfall event duration, the theoretical requirement of the fitted geometric pdf are satisfied (Figure 7). It has to be pointed out that the event-based definition of the rainy season does not exactly fit the theoretical condition. Rainy seasons have variable lengths, as they are a stochastic function of the events themselves. For planning purposes, the longest dry spells associated with the various statistical recurrence periods are derived on the basis of the fitted GEV distributions. Event-based analysis is also useful to check the spatial properties of dry events. Event-based analysis, even if it is carried out on the basis of few years of observation, can rely on large number of data points (table 2). While the expected number of events/season is still derived from very few data, this estimate is more reliable than the approximate expected length of the longest seasonal dry spell, since this variability of the former is usually less than that of the latter, for the same data sets (table 10).

This study, which relied on daily data, describes characteristics of dry spell and their extreme cases. These features are important when estimating the drought risks. Although the region selected for study is not semi arid, data were not always available at the required level of detail. As a result, the detail of the studied events depended on the data collection stations involved. This lack of data is partially compensated by the daily series. In general, this study aimed to define droughts under specific conditions in terms of dry event. We also synthesised information for use in models of climatic risk, infrastructure damage mitigation and environmental management. 2b1af7f3a8