Drought Detection of the Last Century: An MRF-based Approach

Droughts are one of the most damaging climate-related hazards. The late 1960s Sahel drought in Africa and the North American Dust Bowl of the 1930s are two examples of severe droughts that have an impact on society and the environment. Due to the importance of understanding droughts, we consider the problem of their detection based on gridded datasets of precipitation. We formulate the problem as the one of finding the most likely configuration of a Markov Random Field and propose an efficient inference algorithm. We apply this algorithm to the Climate Research Unit precipitation dataset spanning 106 years. The empirical results show that the algorithm successfully identifies the major droughts of the twentieth century in different regions of the world.