As a frequently occurring natural disaster, drought will cause great damage to agricultural production and the sustainable development of a social economy, and it is vital to reasonably evaluate the comprehensive risk level of drought for constructing regional drought-resistant strategies. Therefore, to objectively expound the uncertainty of a drought risk system, the precondition cloud and maximum entropy principle coupling model (PCMEP) for drought risk assessment is proposed, which utilizes the principle of maximum entropy to estimate the probability distribution of cloud drops, and the two-dimensional precondition cloud algorithm to determine the certainty degree of drought risk. Moreover, the established PCMEP model is further applied in a drought risk assessment study in Kunming city covering 1956–2011, and the results indicate that (1) the probability of drought events for different levels exhibits a slight increasing trend among the 56 historical years; and (2) both the integrated certainty degree and its component of drought risk are more evident, which will be more beneficial to determine the drought risk level. In general, the proposed PCMEP model provides a new reliable idea to evaluate the comprehensive risk level of drought from a more objective and systematic perspective.

Drought is one of the most typical and serious natural disasters, which occurs frequently in most of mainland China, and it is crucial to explore the evolution characteristics of drought for developing effective schemes and strategies of drought disaster risk management. Based on the application of Cloud theory in the drought evolution research field, the cloud transformation algorithm, and the conception zooming coupling model was proposed to re-fit the distribution pattern of SPI instead of the Pearson-III distribution. Then the spatio-temporal evolution features of drought were further summarized utilizing the cloud characteristics, average, entropy, and hyper-entropy. Lastly, the application results in Northern Anhui province revealed that the drought condition was the most serious during the period from 1957 to 1970 with the SPI12 index in 49 months being less than −0.5 and 12 months with an extreme drought level. The overall drought intensity varied with the highest certainty level but lowest stability level in winter, but this was opposite in the summer. Moreover, drought hazard would be more significantly intensified along the elevation of latitude in Northern Anhui province. The overall drought hazard in Suzhou and Huaibei were the most serious, which is followed by Bozhou, Bengbu, and Fuyang. Drought intensity in Huainan was the lightest. The exploration results of drought evolution analysis were reasonable and reliable, which would supply an effective decision-making basis for establishing drought risk management strategies.

Construction of an integrated drought index is a fundamental task to conducting drought disaster risk management and developing drought resistance planning strategies. Given the evident non-consistent features during the drought evolution process, firstly, the GAMLSS approach was utilized to construct multiple combination scenarios of time-variant parameters and corresponding probability distribution functions. Then, the time-variant comprehensive drought index integrating the variable characteristics of precipitation and soil moisture was established by means of the copula function. Finally, the reliability of the time-variant comprehensive drought index was verified through its application in frequency analysis and return period determination of drought hazard system in Huaibei Plain, China. The application results demonstrated that: (1) The variation of the time-variant integrated drought indicator presented strong consistency with both soil moisture and precipitation during historical years in Huaibei Plain. (2) The overall variation of the drought hazard system characterized by drought duration and severity presented a gradual mitigation trend from west to east and north to south in Huaibei Plain, which agrees with the geographic differences and water resources availability distribution features. (3) Drought recognition results, including the frequency of drought events and typical drought processes with extreme grades, are in agreement with the practical statistics and observed data series. On the whole, the proposed time-variant integrated drought indicator is capable of extracting complex variation characteristics within the drought hazard evolution process, and can be further applied in drought monitoring, recognition and assessment research fields.

Variability identification and uncertainty characteristic analysis, under the impacts of climate change and human activities, is beneficial for accurately predicting the future evolution trend of hydrological variables. In this study, based on the evolution trend and characteristic analyses of historical precipitation and temperature sequences from monthly, annual, and interannual scales through the Linear Tendency Rate (LTR) index, as well as its variability point identification using the M–K trend test method, we further utilized three cloud characteristic parameters comprising the average Ex, entropy En, and hyper-entropy He of the Cloud Model (CM) method to quantitatively reveal the uncertainty features corresponding to the diverse cloud distribution of precipitation and temperature sample scatters. And then, through an application analysis of the proposed research framework in Anhui Province, China, the following can be summarized from the application results: (1) The annual precipitation of Anhui Province presented a remarkable decreasing trend from south to north and an annual increasing trend from 1960 to 2020, especially in the southern area, with the LTR index equaling 55.87 mm/10a, and the annual average temperature of the entire provincial area also presented an obvious increasing trend from 1960 to 2020, with LTR equaling about 0.226 °C/10a. (2) The uncertainty characteristic of the precipitation series was evidently intensified after the variability points in 2013 and 2014 in the southern and provincial areas, respectively, according to the derived values of entropy En and hyper-entropy He, which are basically to the contrary for the historical annual average temperature series in southern Anhui Province. (3) The obtained result was basically consistent with the practical statistics of historical hydrological and disaster data, indicating that the proposed research methodologies can be further applied in related variability diagnosis analyses of non-stationary hydrological variables.