A new approach for a drought composite index

Drought is one of the most critical meteorological hazards that has a devastating effect on natural habitats, ecosystems, and many economic and social sectors. Due to these severe impacts of drought events, many studies have focused on drought monitoring, prediction, and risk analysis to aid drought preparedness plans and mitigation measures. This paper presents a new drought composite index (DCI) to measure the intensity and frequency of the hazard component of meteorological drought. The DCI considers multiple indicators, such as precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, wind speed, relative humidity, and sunshine duration. The DCI is validated through an application to the Brazilian semiarid context. Based on the expert's opinion, we define the weight of each indicator using the analytical hierarchy process. The results were compared with two other drought indices to provide an initial validation because the other indices are not exclusively meteorological indices. The DCI estimates for January 2019 show that the semiarid central region is the most critical. The findings also indicate that the drought intensity is growing in this region.