The Copula Function-Based Probability Characteristics Analysis on Seasonal Drought & Flood Combination Events on the North China Plain

Drought & flood events, especially the drought & flood combination events (DFCEs) on the North China Plain (NCP), known as an important grain production region in China, constitute a serious threat to China’s food security. Studies on DFCEs in this region are of great significance for the rational allocation of water resources and the formulation of integrated response strategy for droughts and floods. In this study, L-moments theory and bivariate copula method were used to evaluate the probability characteristics of seasonal DFCEs (continuous drought, continuous flood, and alternation between drought and flood) on the NCP, based on the daily precipitation data (1960–2012) at 19 meteorological stations. Results indicate the following: (1) On the NCP, the precipitation in summer accounts for 56.45%–72.02% of mean annual precipitation, and the precipitation in autumn and spring come second. The winter precipitation is the smallest (less than 4%); (2) The best-fit OPEN ACCESS Atmosphere 2014, 5 848 distribution for precipitation anomaly percentages in spring, summer and autumn are Generalized Normal (GNO), Generalized Logistic (GLO) and Pearson III (P-III) in sub-region I, respectively. While in sub-region II, they are respectively the P-III, P-III and Generalized Extreme-Value (GEV); (3) Compared with the Gumbel copula and Clayton copula, Frank copula is more suitable for spring-summer and summer-autumn precipitation anomaly percentage sequences on the NCP; (4) On the time scale, continuous drought respectively dominate in spring-summer DFCEs and in summer-autumn DFCEs on the NCP. Summer-autumn DFCEs prevail in sub-region I with the average probability value 0.34, while spring-summer DFCEs dominate in sub-region II, of which average probability value is 0.42; (5) On the spatial scale, most areas where the probability of continuous drought in spring-summer and spring drought & summer flood is relatively high are located in the northwest, northeast, and coastal parts of sub-region II; all the events with high probability of continuous drought in summer-autumn and summer flood & autumn drought occurred at the central part in the northwest of sub-region II.