A comparison of hydrological drought characteristics defined by the POT and SPA methods in the Dunajec River basin

This paper addresses the problem of how drought definition by POT and SPA methods influences drought characteristics. Using the 1984- 2013 daily flows at 24 selected gauging stations in the Dunajec river basin and assuming two threshold levels Q70% and Q95% and four minimum drought durations (5, 7, 10 and 14 days) as the pre-set criteria, it was shown that, when compared to the POT method, the application of the SPA method usually leads to less number of droughts and, consequently, of longer duration. The SPA method, differently from POT, reduces dramatically the number of inter-event times, which suggests that some adjacent POT droughts may be dependent and should be pooled.