Paper Title: Copula-Based Bivariate Frequency Analysis of Drought Characteristics over India

Integrated Drought Management, Volume 2

Vivek Gupta, Manoj Kumar Jain., & Shivam Gupta

India, being an agrarian economy, is highly sensitive to droughts. Most parts of India suffer from droughts every few years. If the frequency distribution of droughts can be understood, it would help with storage planning such that the loss from droughts can be minimized. Traditionally, univariate frequency analysis has been utilized for finding the return period of droughts and engineering designs. But recently, multivariate techniques have proven to provide more robust and useful results. Especially, in hydrology, dependence among the variable is very high, and multivariate dependence analysis is increasingly being used. Copula-based frequency analysis has emerged as a great tool to understand the relationship between two variables and analyze the dependence structure. Drought characteristics such as magnitude, duration, and peak values are highly correlated variables. Therefore, the potential of copula-based analysis can be harnessed to analyze the bivariate frequency distribution and corresponding return periods. In this chapter, we present a pan-India study to present the copula-based analysis to understand the bivariate structure of drought characteristics in different parts of India.