Agricultural Drought Prediction Based on Conditional Distributions of Vine Copulas

Monitoring and prediction of agricultural drought are paramount to food security at the global and regional scales, particularly under the influence of climate change and anthropogenic activities. Soil moisture is an effective indicator for monitoring and characterizing agricultural drought. Soil moisture (agricultural drought) is mainly affected by precipitation (meteorological drought) and temperature (hot conditions). Owing to the flexibility of vine copulas in handling multidimensional variables by decomposing them into pair copula constructions (PCCs), we propose a novel drought prediction method using three predictors, namely antecedent meteorological drought, previous hot conditions, and persistent agricultural drought, based on the conditional distributions of C-vine copulas in a four-dimensional scenario. The proposed model was applied to agricultural drought (characterized by the standardized soil moisture index (SSI)) prediction with 1–2-months lead time for the summer season (i.e., August at a 6-months timescale) in China. Taking two severe agricultural drought events that occurred in many regions across China in August of 2006 and 2014 as validation cases, the SSI predictions with 1–2-months lead time using the conditional C-vine copulas model were found to be generally consistent with the corresponding historical SSI observations in most parts of China. Performance evaluation using the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), coefficient of determination (R2), and F1 score (F1S) for different climate regions also indicated that this model provided a reliable prediction of agricultural drought for most areas of China. The outcome of this study can serve as a guidance for drought prediction, early warning, and drought mitigation.