spei 0.1.8

A simple Python package to calculate drought indices for time series such as the SPI, SPEI and SGI.

SPEI

A simple Python package to calculate drought indices for time series such as the SPI (Standardized Precipitation Index), SPEI (Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index) and SGI (Standardized Groundwater Index). There are other great packages available to calculate these indices However, they are either written in R such as SPEI or don't have the Standardized Groundwater Index such as climate_indices. Additionaly, these packages provide ways to analyse spatial data and calculate potential evaporation. This makes these packages complex since it is easier to only deal with time series. Therefore, this package uses the popular Python packages such as Pandas and Scipy to make it easy but versitile for the user to calculate the drought indices. With the use of Scipy all distributions available in the library can be used to fit the data. However, there are general recommendations for distributions when calculating the SPEI, SPI an SGI.

Note that, all time series have to be calculated in advance and be provided as a pandas Series. For the calculation of potential evaporation, we refer to pyet.

Available Drought Indices

Drought Index	Abbreviation	Literature
Standardized Precipitation Index	SPI	1
Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index	SPEI	2
Standardized Groundwater Index	SGI	3,4
Standardized Streamflow Index	SSFI	5

The package is not limited to only these four drought indices. If any of the distributions in the Scipy library is valid, the drought index can be calculated.

Installation

To get the latest stable version install using:

pip install spei

To get the development version download the GitHub code to your computer. Use cd to get to the download directory and install using:

pip install -e .

Nice to haves in the future:

• Add way to identify best distribution on time series (with Scipy, Fitter or distfit)

• Check SGI for other distributions

Feel free to contribute!

Literature

1. B. Lloyd-Hughes and M.A. Saunders (2002) - A Drought Climatology for Europe. DOI: 10.1002/joc.846
2. S.M. Vicente-Serrano, S. Beguería and J.I. López-Moreno (2010) - A Multi-scalar drought index sensitive to global warming: The Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index. DOI: 10.1175/2009JCLI2909.1
3. J.P.Bloomfield and B.P. Marchant, B. P. (2013) - Analysis of groundwater drought building on the standardised precipitation index approach. DOI: 10.5194/hess-17-4769-2013
4. A. Babre, A. Kalvāns, Z. Avotniece, I. Retiķe, J. Bikše, K.P.M. Jemeljanova, A. Zelenkevičs and A. Dēliņa (2022) - The use of predefined drought indices for the assessment of groundwater drought episodes in the Baltic States over the period 1989–2018. DOI: 10.1016/j.ejrh.2022.101049
5. E. Tijdeman, K. Stahl and L.M. Tallaksen (2020) - Drought characteristics derived based on the Standardized Streamflow Index: A large sample comparison for parametric and nonparametric methods. DOI: 10.1029/2019WR026315