District level drought assessment over Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Drought is one of the recurrent climate phenomenon that crippling the societal and economic development of the agrarian country. It occurs almost everywhere, although its features vary from region to region. The present study was undertaken to assess the drought in Tamil Nadu using the precipitation data of historic climatic period (1981-2017) with high spatial resolution (17 Km). Rainfall deviation from the long term mean during SWM, NEM and annual time scale was calculated at district level for identifying the drought prone districts in Tamil Nadu. The results showed that the frequency of the drought events was higher during the SWM as compared to NEM. Results indicated that Tirunelveli, Theni, Tiruppur, Karur, Tiruchirapalli districts were prone to the drought during SWM. As the NEM is the primary rainfall season and active crop growing period, suitable drought mitigation strategies need to be designed for the districts viz., Kanyakumari, Salem, Thiruvallur, which are highly affected due to deficit rainfall during NEM.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.2019.000250

Pages

225 - 227

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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