CHALLENGES IN DROUGHT RESEARCH : SOME PERSPECTIVES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In meteorological drought, the severity has been defined in the form of indices such as the PALMER drought severity index. There exist a variety of techniques and methods to analyse the duration and severity of meteorological and hydrological droughts through probability characterization of low flows, time series methods, synthetic data generation, theory of runs, multiple regression, group theory, pattern recognition and neural network methods. A major challenge is to develop suitable methods and techniques for forecasting the onset and termination points of droughts.