Tail dependence of Bivariate Copulas for Drought Severity and Duration

Drought is a natural hazard with different properties that are usually dependent to each other. Therefore, a multivariate model is often used for drought frequency analysis. The Copula based bivariate drought severity and duration frequency analysis is applied in the current study in order to show the effect of tail behavior of drought severity and duration on the selection of a copula function for drought bivariate frequency analysis. Four copula functions, namely Clayton, Gumbel, Frank and Gaussian, were fitted to drought data of four stations in Iran and Canada in different climate regions. The drought data are calculated based on standardized precipitation index time series. The performance of different copula functions is evaluated by estimating drought bivariate return periods in two cases, [$D{\geq}d$ and $S{\geq}s$] and [$D{\geq}d$ or $S{\geq}s$]. The bivariate return period analysis indicates the behavior of the tail of the copula functions on the selection of the best bivariate model for drought analysis.