Calculated multi-scale SPEI and SRI drought indices for drought propagation analysis in the Yellow River Basin

This dataset was created to support the paper titled “Unveiling Drought Propagation Mechanisms in the Yellow River Basin through Integrated Spatial Autocorrelation and Causal Analysis”. It contains calculated Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and Standardized Runoff Index (SRI) for the Yellow River Basin from 1979 to 2022, at a spatial resolution of 0.01 degrees, covering 1-month, 3-month, and 6-month timescales. The raw data sources are surface runoff data from the ERA5-Land reanalysis dataset and precipitation and potential evapotranspiration data from the China Meteorological Driving Dataset (China-Met). The core processing steps included: converting the original NetCDF files to GeoTIFF format, spatially clipping them using the basin boundary, downscaling the resolution uniformly to 0.01 degrees via bilinear interpolation, and finally calculating the multi-scale SPEI and SRI indices. The data is stored in GeoTIFF format using the WGS 84 geographic coordinate system (EPSG:4326), with pixel values outside the study area set to NaN. File names follow a clear convention, e.g., “SPEI_1_YR_2010.tif” denotes the 1-month SPEI index for the year 2010. When using this dataset, please cite this dataset itself, the provided source data publications (ERA5-Land and China-Met), and the relevant methodological papers for the indices.