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Abstract:
Spatial and temporal characteristics of droughts in the western part of Bangladesh have been analysed. Standardized
precipitation index method is used to compute the severity of droughts from the rainfall data recorded in 12 rainfall gauge
stations for the period of 1961–1999. An artificial neural network is used to estimate missing rainfall data. Geographic
Information System (GIS) is used to map the spatial extent of droughts of different severities in multiple time scales. Critical
analysis of rainfall is also carried to find the minimum monsoon and dry months rainfall require in different parts of the study
area to avoid rainfall deficit. The study shows that the north and north-western parts of Bangladesh are most vulnerable to
droughts. A significant negative relationship between multiple ENSO index and rainfall is observed in some stations. Analysis
of seasonal rainfall distribution, rainfall reliability and long-term rainfall trend is also conducted to aid prediction of future
droughts in the area. Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
has also been reported that SPI provides a better spa- by De Martonne and Thornthwaite methods are 20Ð89
tial standardization than the other indices (Lloyd-Hughes and 64Ð04, respectively, in the central-western and north-
and Saunders, 2002). Therefore, SPI is used to study western parts of Bangladesh. As the dryness index values
the spatial and temporal characteristics of meteorological in the region are close to those of a dry zone, the climate
drought in western Bangladesh. Critical rainfall analysis, of these regions of Bangladesh can be considered very
seasonal rainfall distribution, rainfall reliability and long- close to ‘dry’. The total annual evapotranspiration in this
term rainfall trend are also studied to aid prediction of part of Bangladesh is also lower than or equal to the
droughts in the area. annual rainfall in some years. The location map of the
study area is shown in Figure 3.
HYDRO-CLIMATE OF BANGLADESH
Geographically, Bangladesh extends from 20° 340 N to DATA AND METHODS
26° 380 N latitude and from 88° 010 E to 92° 410 E longi- Rainfall data for the 39 years 1961–1999 from 12
tude. Climatically, the country belongs to the sub-tropical meteorological stations in the western part of Bangladesh
region where monsoon weather prevails throughout the was used to study the characteristics of meteorological
year in most parts of the country. The average tempera- drought. The main problem encountered during the study
ture of the country ranges from 17 ° C to 20Ð6 ° C during of droughts is missing rainfall data. The methods used to
winter and 26Ð9 ° C to 31Ð1 ° C during summer. The aver- estimate the missing rainfall data and to study drought
age relative humidity for the whole year ranges from characteristics are discussed below.
70Ð5% to 78Ð1%, with a maximum in September and a
minimum in March. Three distinct seasons can be rec-
Estimation of missing rainfall data
ognized in Bangladesh from the climatic point of view:
(i) the dry winter season from December to February; Numerous methods for estimating missing data have
(ii) the pre-monsoon hot summer season from March to been described in the literature (Creutin and Obled, 1982;
May; and (iii) the rainy monsoon season, which lasts Seo et al., 1990; Kuligowshi and Barros, 1998; Schnei-
from June to October (Rashid, 1991). der, 2001; Teegavarapu and Chandramouli, 2005). In the
The spatial distribution of rainfall over the country is present study, a feedforward artificial neural network
shown in Figure 1a. The map has been prepared from (ANN) approach similar to that proposed by Teegavarapu
rainfall data for the 30 years 1970–1999, available at and Chandramouli (2005) is used for the estimation of
50 meteorological stations situated in and around the missing rainfall data. ANNs are computer models that
country. The average annual rainfall of the country varies mimic the structure and functioning of the human brain,
from 1329 mm in the north-west to 4338 mm in the and are known for their ability to generalize well on a
north-east (Shahid et al., 2005). The map shows that the wide variety of problems and are well suited to predic-
western part of Bangladesh receives much lower rainfall tion applications (Bishop, 1995). Unlike many statistical
than other parts of the country. The monthly distribution methods, ANN models do not make dependency assump-
of rainfall over the western part of the country is shown tions among input variables and can solve multivariate
on the graph in Figure 1b. The monthly distribution is problems with nonlinear relationships among input vari-
calculated from rainfall data for the 39 years 1961–1999 ables. The efficiency of ANN models does not depend
available at 12 stations in the study area. The right on the density of measuring stations, rather on the num-
vertical axis of the graph represents rainfall in millimetres ber of stations used for the estimation of missing data
and the left vertical axis represents the rainfall as a (Teegavarapu and Chandramouli, 2005). As the density
percentage of annual total rainfall. The graph shows that of rain gauges in the study area is low and ANNs are
rainfall is very much seasonal in the area, almost 77% supposed to be suited to any distribution of rainfall sta-
of rainfall occurring during the monsoon. In summer, the tions, the method is used in this paper for the estimation
hottest days experience temperatures of 45 ° C or even of missing rainfall data.
hotter. In the winter the temperature falls to 5 ° C in some The missing rainfall data is random in most stations,
places (Banglapedia, 2003). Thus, the region experiences however, continuous missing data for several years is
two extremities that clearly contrast with the climatic also evident at some stations. The percentage of missing
conditions of the rest of the country. rainfall data varies between 6% and 22% from station
A dryness study of Bangladesh, carried out using the to station, except one station (Khepupara), where about
De Martonne aridity index (Figure 2a) and the Thornth- 39% of the data is missing. The average level of missing
waite precipitation effectiveness index (Figure 2b) meth- rainfall data in the study area is 14%. Although the per-
ods (Essenwanger, 2001) from climatic data for the formance of ANNs improves with increasing percentage
30 years 1970–1999 available at 50 meteorological sta- of training data, studies have shown that training with
tions situated in and around Bangladesh, shows that west- 60% of the total data can reliably estimate unknown data
ern side of Bangladesh can be classified ‘sub-humid’, (Teegavarapu and Chandramouli, 2005). Therefore, it can
the central part ‘humid’ and a small part of the north- be assumed that the ANN model estimated missing data
eastern side ‘wet’. The lowest index values obtained in the present study with acceptable accuracy.
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
DROUGHTS OF BANGLADESH 2237
Figure 1. (a) Spatial distribution of annual mean rainfall over Bangladesh; (b) monthly distribution of rainfall in the western part of Bangladesh
The topology of the ANN used for the estimation of output and the desired output. In the hidden and output
missing rainfall data is 6 : 4 : 1, as shown in Figure 4. The layers, a sigmoidal activation function was used to model
topology was selected using a trial and error procedure. the transformation of values across the layers. After
The input neurons use values from six neighbouring computing the missing rainfall data, a geospatial database
stations around the station of interest and the output of rainfall time series is developed within a GIS by
neuron of the ANN provides the missing value at the following the concept proposed by Goodall et al. (2004).
station of interest. Neural network training is done
using a supervised back-propagation training algorithm Calculation of standardized precipitation index
(Rumelhart and Mclelland, 1986; Haykin, 1994). The The standardized precipitation index (SPI, Mckee
choice of learning rate, momentum factor and activation et al., 1993) is a widely used drought index based on the
function for the ANN determines the rate and reliability probability of precipitation for multiple time scales, e.g.
of the training of the network. In the present case, a 1-, 3-, 6-, 9-, 12-, 18- and 24-month. It provides a com-
learning rate of 0Ð1 and momentum factor of 0Ð4 was parison of the precipitation over a specific period with the
used. These factors were obtained by a trial and error precipitation totals from the same period for all the years
method (Haykin, 1994). A gradient descent technique included in the historical record. For example, a 3-month
was used to adopt weights in the ANN structure to SPI at the end of May compares the March-April-May
minimize the mean squared difference between the ANN precipitation total in that particular year with the March
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
2238 S. SHAHID
Figure 2. Aridity maps obtained by (a) De Martonne aridity index; and (b) Thornthwaite precipitation effectiveness index methods from rainfall data
for the 30 years 1970– 1999
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
DROUGHTS OF BANGLADESH 2239
Rainfall reliability
To compute rainfall reliability, the coefficient of rain-
fall variation (CV) in percentage is used,
CV D 100 ð υ/R
Spatial interpolation
For the mapping of the spatial extent of rainfall and
droughts from point data, a Kriging interpolation method
is used. Geostatistical analysis tool of ArcMap 9Ð1 (ESRI,
2004) is used for this purpose. Kriging is a stochas-
tic interpolation method (Journel and Huijbregts, 1981;
Isaaks and Srivastava, 1989), which is widely recog-
nized as a standard approach for surface interpolation
based on scalar measurements at different points. Stud-
ies showed that Kriging gives better global predictions
than other methods (van Beers and Kleijnen, 2004). How-
ever, Kriging is an optimal surface interpolation method
based on spatially dependent variance, which is gener-
ally expressed as a semi-variogram. Surface interpolation
Figure 3. Study area and the location of meteorological stations
using Kriging depends on the selected semi-variogram
model, and the semi-variogram must be fitted with a
mathematical function or model. Depending on the shape
of semi-variograms, different models are used in the
present study for their fitting.
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
2240 S. SHAHID
Figure 5. Arial values of SPI for (a) 3-month and (b) 6-month time steps
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
DROUGHTS OF BANGLADESH 2241
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
2242 S. SHAHID
Figure 8. Moderate drought occurrences at (a) 3-month and (b) 6-month time steps
Figure 9. Severe drought occurrences at (a) 3-month and (b) 6-month time steps
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
DROUGHTS OF BANGLADESH 2243
Figure 10. Very severe drought occurrences at (a) 3-month and (b) 6-month time steps
Figure 11. Maps showing spatial distribution of minimum (a) monsoon rainfall; and (b) dry months rainfall required to avoid precipitation deficit in
the study area
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
2244 S. SHAHID
Figure 12. Maps showing spatial distribution of average (a) monsoon; and (b) dry months rainfall for the 39 years 1961– 1999 over the study area
Figure 13. Maps showing the spatial distribution of rainfall reliability during (a) monsoon; (b) dry months in the study area
the eastern part of the area (Figure 12b). This is higher during the monsoon months (Figure 13a) and dry months
than the minimum rainfall required for normal condition (Figure 13b) shows that the rainfall is highly variable
in the area. However, reliability analysis of rainfall in some parts of the area. The variation in monsoon
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
DROUGHTS OF BANGLADESH 2245
Areal Average
more than 50% of the average rainfall in north-western
0Ð04
and central-western parts of the area. The rainfall vari-
0
ability in the northern part is comparatively less dur-
ing dry months, but is high (between 28% and 30%)
during the monsoon. As critical rainfall values in the
Satkhira north-western part of the area are very near to the
0Ð06
0Ð04
average rainfall of the area and the year to year vari-
ation of rainfall in the area is very high, it can be
assumed that the area is very vulnerable to future severe
Rangpur
droughts.
1Ð44
0Ð3Ł
0Ð49
0Ð11
2Ð03
0Ð17
1Ð88
0Ð17
1Ð45
0Ð16
0Ð28Ł
0Ð12
0Ð06
1Ð79
0Ð2
0Ð39
0Ð08
1962–63 1963
1965–66 1966, 1968
Linear Regression
1972–73 1973
1977–78 1977, 1979
Kendall-Tau
1982–83 1982
1987–88 1989
1991–93 1992
1994–95 1994–1995
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
2246 S. SHAHID
Satkhira
Drought and ENSO phenomena relationship
Areal Average
0Ð14
0Ð15
A relationship between drought in Bangladesh and El
0Ð28
0Ð22
Nino has been observed. El Nino years and drought years
in Bangladesh are compared in Table III. The relationship
between the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) and rainfall
Rangpur
0Ð31
0Ð16
and SPI in the study area is estimated using a two-
Satkhira
0Ð05
0Ð05
Rangpur
0Ð09
0Ð07
0Ð13
0Ð13
0Ð22
0Ð27
Jessore
0Ð07
0Ð02
CONCLUSIONS
Ishurdi
0Ð03
0Ð06
0Ð47
0Ð42
0Ð06
0Ð04
but the area has a higher potential for drought. The max-
imum rainfall demand in this area is also high compared
Bogra
0Ð12
0Ð10
0Ð02
0Ð20
0Ð43
0Ð39
0Ð47
0Ð41
Spearman
Pearson
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp
DROUGHTS OF BANGLADESH 2247
Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Hydrol. Process. 22, 2235– 2247 (2008)
DOI: 10.1002/hyp