Mining Spatial Co-occurrence of Drought Events from Climate Data of India

Increasingly in the recent past, the focus on climate change is moving towards the understanding of the occurrence, both in magnitude and frequency, of extreme climatic events like droughts and floods. In this paper, an effort has been made towards identification of spatial co-occurrence of droughts across various subdivisions of India, based on the historical climatological data of the past century. The results show that similarities in the climate forcing factors have a role in spatio-temporal correlation of events. Also, from the results, it is seen that the well-known spatial autocorrelations measures, such as Moran Index, are not sufficient to explain such co-occurrences of events.