Luis Jose Cerpa

Dr. Luis Jose Cerpa

Universidad de Sucre

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

5Years (2022-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

View All Publications
30 January 2022 in Atmosphere
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
LCLuis Jose Cerpa
Luis Jose Cerpa
HRHumberto Ávila Rangel
Humberto Ávila Rangel
Luis Carlos Sandoval-HerazoLuis Carlos Sandoval-Herazo
Luis Carlos Sandoval-Herazo
The evaluation of the meteorological drought is fundamental for the management of the water resource. One of the most used indices to evaluate the drought is the standardized precipitation index (SPI) due to its practicality and evaluation in a variety of time scales, however, this uses precipitation as the only variable, depending on the deviations in the precipitation values. This is important when evaluating the SPI, because in some ecosystems close to the equatorial zone, there are very warm periods with low rainfall, in which a large proportion of the data collected by the meteorological stations corresponds to zero. In this research, the SPI was calculated in the Pechelín basin located in Colombia, in which there is zero precipitation in a large proportion of the data, registering zero precipitation in the month of January and February in 67% and 70% respectively. As a result, the SPI values increased to “wet” ranges, only when the amount of data with zero precipitation exceeded half of the total data; this means that the SPI determines wrong values when it is calculated with zero-precipitation data in large proportions. Based on this finding, this study aims to modify the index by typing the distribution (using a correction factor K), finally correcting the SPI values, this correction was called SPI-C. The results indicate that the SPI-C improved the identification of drought, obtaining corresponding values that better represent the high frequency of zero precipitation existing in the study area.