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Drought can cause severe agricultural economic losses and hinder social and economic development. To manage drought, the process of drought events needs to be described with the help of an effective drought indicator. As a comprehensive variable, soil moisture is an essential indicator for describing agricultural drought. In this work, the extreme drought events in southwest China were analysed by the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) root zone soil moisture data set. To define the drought quantitatively, a Standardized Soil Moisture Drought Index (SSMI) was calculated using the soil moisture data, then used to get the duration, frequency, and severity of drought events in southwest China. The results showed that the frequency and intensity of drought in southwest China had an apparent upward trend before 2014 and an apparent downward trend since 2014. Moreover, there are apparent differences in the frequency and intensity of drought in various regions of southwest China. Yunnan Province is prone to spring drought events. Guangxi Province and Guizhou Province are prone to spring, autumn and winter droughts, and the intensity of autumn and winter droughts is significantly higher than that of spring droughts. The Sichuan-Chongqing border area is prone to summer drought. We found that the monthly variation of soil moisture in different provinces in southwest China is consistent, but the seasonal variation of drought is different. Meanwhile, the performance of the SSMI was compared to the commonly used drought indices, the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). The results showed that the SSMI is more sensitive to drought than both SPEI and PDSI in southwest China. The results also demonstrate that GLDAS soil moisture data can be used to study drought at a small regional scale.

Monitoring of Extreme Agricultural Drought of the Past 20 Years in Southwest China Using GLDAS Soil Moisture