The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) has been used for more than 30 years to quantify the long-term drought conditions for a given location and time. However, a common critique of the PDSI is that the behavior of the index at various locations is inconsistent, making spatial comparisons of PDSI values difficult, if not meaningless. A self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (SC-PDSI) ...

[1] The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) has been widely used to study aridity changes in modern and past climates. Efforts to address its major problems have led to new variants of the PDSI, such as the self‐calibrating PDSI (sc_PDSI) and PDSI using improved formulations for potential evapotranspiration (PE), such as the Penman‐Monteith equation (PE_pm) instead of the Thornthwaite equation...

We describe an alternative method of climate field reconstruction and test it against an existing set of dendroclimatic reconstructions of summer drought patterns over the conterminous US back to AD 1700. The new reconstructions are based on a set of 483 drought-sensitive tree-ring chronologies available across the continental US. In contrast with the ‘point-by-point’ (PPR) local regression tec...

Considerable attention has recently been devoted to the linear trend of drought at the decadal to inter-decadal time scale; however, the nonlinear variation of drought at multi-decadal scales and its relation to atmospheric circulation need to be further studied. The linear and nonlinear variations of the Palmer drought severity index (PDSI) in Shandong from 1900 to 2012 and its relations to th...

Vegetation effects are currently disregarded in Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), and the sensitivity of PDSI to the choice of potential evaporation (EP) parameterization is often a concern. We developed a revised self-calibrating PDSI model that replaces EP with leaf area index-based total evapotranspiration (ARTS E0). It also included a simple snowmelt module. Using a unique satellite lea...

Water level monitoring is important for understanding the global hydrological cycle. Remotely-sensed indices that capture localized instantaneous responses have been extensively explored for water level reconstruction during the past two decades. However, the potential usage of the Palmer’s Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) indices for water level reconstruct...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with an array of signs and symptoms and motor fluctuations. In addition, treatments such as levodopa and dopamine agonists are associated with side-effects that impact the same health domains as disease symptomatology. To comprehensively and sensitively assess drug therapies in respect of disease symptoms and side-effects, we designed the Parkinson's disea...