Estimation and assessment of long-term drought outlook information using the long-term forecasting data

The objective of this study is to evaluate the long-term drought outlook information based on long-term forecast data for the 2015 drought event. In order to estimate the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) for different durations (3-, 6-, 9-, 12-months), we used the observation precipitation of 59 Automated Synoptic Observing System (ASOS) sites, forecast and hindcast data of GloSea5. The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis and statistical analysis (Correlation Coefficient, CC; Root Mean Square Error, RMSE) were used to evaluate the utilization of drought outlook information for the forecast lead-times (1~6months). As a result of ROC analysis, ROC scores of SPI(3), SPI(6), SPI(9) and SPI(12) were estimated to be over 0.70 until the 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-months. The CC and RMSE values of SPI(3), SPI(6), SPI(9) and SPI(12) for forecast lead-time were estimated as (0.60, 0.87), (0.72, 0.95), (0.75, 0.95) and (0.77, 0.89) until the 2-, 4-, 5- and 6-months respectively.