Simulation of the occurrence of drought events via copulas

ABSTRACT This study presents a method based on Archimedean and Gaussian copulas to simulate the occurrence of hydrological droughts. The droughts were characterized by theory of runs for four threshold levels and six univariate probability distributions were evaluated to represent the probabilistic behavior of their severities and durations. The Akaike Information Criterion was used to select the better univariate probabilistic models, while their hypotheses of goodness-of-fit to the historical data were evaluated by Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Based on the univariate probability distributions of severities and durations, Archimedean and Gaussian copulas were used in the bivariate analysis of the drought events. The proposed method proves to be a useful tool to simulate the occurrence of drought events, preserving the laws of probability of the severities and durations and the dependency between both.