Abstract

Drought’s frequency, duration and severity areessentials for impact control and mitigation of droughts. Thispaper adopts 3-month seasonal scale Streamflow Drought Index(SDI-3) to analyze these drought characteristics for the tropicalclimate at the Central, Southern and East Coast regions ofPeninsular Malaysia in 1997-2016. The identified droughtevents were then evaluated using four major historical eventsfrom five different locations. The results showed that SDI-3identified the occurrences of all reported drought events butwith deviated onset and duration. However, the SDI-3 wasconcluded to be suitable for hydrological drought monitoringwith reasons of increased temperature, groundwater and forestreplenishment, and human factors. The spatial analysis on thedrought characteristics also showed that most of the areas aremore prone to short-term droughts, with relatively higherseverity at north part of the Central Region, north-west part ofthe Southern Region and central part of the East Coast.