Drought Hazard Modelling: Exploring A Drought Indicator for Malawi

Abstract

With a single growing season, drought as a consequence of climate change has taken a toll on Malawi’s agro-based economy. In the context of climate change, an accurate and comprehensive assessment of drought at regional level is very significant to sustain agricultural development and manage natural disasters. Despite considerable improvements, world drought models are still not able to accurately represent the large number of factors that are responsible for causing droughts across different regions of Africa such as Malawi. This paper deploys a number of drought input variables, i.e., precipitation, minimum temperature, maximum temperature and potential evapotranspiration to construct a Malawi Drought Index (MaDI) using multiple linear regression and GIS in order to best explain the complex interaction of major drought indicators, as well as to validate the accuracy of global drought models in the country. A strong positive correlation was observed between the Malawi Drought Index (MaDI) and the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) suggesting that the MaDI does not depart very much from the existing drought models. This paper therefore promotes the improvement of the MaDI as a new, easier and better local drought prediction and assessment method in Malawi.