Global agricultural drought policy has shifted towards promoting drought preparedness and climate resilience in favor of disaster-relief-based strategies. For this approach to be successful, drought predictability and methods for assessing the many aspects of drought need to be improved. Therefore, this study aims to bring together meteorological and hydrological measures of drought as well as vegetation and soil moisture data to assess how droughts begin, propagate and subsequently terminate for a catchment in eastern Australia. For the study area, 13 meteorological drought periods persisting more than 6 months were identified over the last 100 years. During these periods, vegetation health, soil moisture and streamflow declined; however, all of the indicators recovered quickly post-drought, with no evidence of extended impacts on the rainfall–runoff response, as has been observed elsewhere. Furthermore, drought initiation and propagation were found to be tightly coupled to the combined state of large-scale ocean–atmosphere climate drivers (e.g., the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode), whereas termination was caused by persistent synoptic systems (e.g., low-pressure troughs). The combination of climatic factors, topography, soils and vegetation are believed to be what makes the study catchments more resilient to drought than others in eastern Australia. This study diversifies traditional approaches to studying droughts by quantifying the catchment response to drought using a range of measures that could also be applied in other catchments globally. This is a key step towards improved drought management.

Drought, and its associated impacts, represents one of the costliest natural hazards worldwide, highlighting the need for prediction and preparedness. While advancements have been made in monitoring current droughts, prediction of onset and termination have proven to be much more challenging. This is because drought is unlike any other natural hazard and cannot be characterised by a single weather event. There is also a high degree of spatial variability in this phenomenon across the vast expanse of the Australian continent. Therefore, by characterising regionally specific expressions of drought, we may improve drought predictability. In this study, we analyse the timing of onset and termination of meteorological droughts across Australia from 1900 to 2015, as well as their local and regional climate controls. We show that meteorological drought onset has a strong seasonal signature across Australia that varies spatially, whereas termination is less seasonally restricted. Using a Random Forest modelling approach with predictor variables representative of large-scale ocean-atmosphere phenomena and local climate, up to 75% of the variance in the Standardised Precipitation Index during both onset and termination could be explained. This study offers support to continued development in long-lead forecasting of local and large-scale ocean/atmosphere conditions to improve drought prediction in Australia and elsewhere.