Evaluation of the impacts of human activities on propagation from meteorological drought to hydrological drought in the Weihe River Basin, China

Understanding the relationship among different types of drought is crucial for drought mitigation and early warnings. Much attention has been recently focused on the propagation from meteorological drought (MD) to hydrological drought (HD); however, the influences of human activities on drought propagation have rarely been explored. The novelty of the study was to propose an effective framework to quantify the impacts of human activities on MD-HD propagation. We adopted the framework to comprehensively evaluate the anthropic impacts on hydrological drought variations and time, thresholds, and probabilities of MD-HD propagation in the Weihe River Basin (WRB) during different periods. The results showed that human activities did significantly disturb HD variations and MD-HD propagation characteristics. Specifically, human activities increased the frequency and extremes of HD and weakened its correlation with MD. The MD-HD propagation characteristics showed spatiotemporal differences across three subbasins because of the different levels of human activities. The thresholds of MD triggering different levels of HD generally became larger with change rates from 1% to 143% and 3% to more than 189% during two periods, respectively. Meanwhile, we also found that the thresholds became distinctly smaller, which could only be observed in spring and winter. Moreover, the relationship between natural and human-induced probabilities of HD occurrence showed three patterns with the increase of MD severity. The quantitative results of this study can provide guide information on adaptation strategies to promote drought preparedness in the WRB. The proposed framework can be also applied in other regions to improve the understanding of hydrological drought mechanisms.