Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) experiences a recurrent drought phenomenon. However, few studies have focused on drought monitoring in this region due to lack of ground observations. The newly released Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS) with a long-term record and high resolution has a great potential for drought monitoring. Based on the assessment of CHIRPS for capturing precipitation and monitoring drought, this study aims to evaluate the drought condition in LMB by using satellite-based CHIRPS from January 1981 to July 2016. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) at various time scales (1–12-month) is computed to identify and describe drought events. Results suggest that CHIRPS can properly capture the drought characteristics at various time scales with the best performance at three-month time scale. Based on high-resolution long-term CHIRPS, it is found that LMB experienced four severe droughts during the last three decades with the longest one in 1991–1994 for 38 months and the driest one in 2015–2016 with drought affected area up to 75.6%. Droughts tend to occur over the north and south part of LMB with higher frequency, and Mekong Delta seems to experience more long-term and extreme drought events. Severe droughts have significant impacts on vegetation condition.

This study investigated spatial and temporal variations of extreme precipitation over Yunnan Province during 1960–2012. On the basis of a dataset from 120 meteorological stations covering the region, ten precipitation indices derived from daily precipitation were computed and analysed. Our results indicate the precipitation indices showed spatially complex trends. Most precipitation indices present increasing trends in western Yunnan and decreasing trends in eastern Yunnan. The western, southern and central regions experienced an increase in consecutive dry days (CDDs) and decrease in consecutive wet days (CWDs). In addition, a widespread increase was also found in precipitation intensity over Yunnan. On a region‐wide scale, a weak decrease was observed in total precipitation, accompanied by an increase in precipitation intensity. CDDs tended to be prolonged while the CWDs tended to be shortened. The days with precipitation amounts totaling more than 10 mm and maximum 5‐day precipitation amount had decreasing but not significant trends. In contrast, insignificant increases were found for the maximum 1‐day precipitation and annual total precipitation exceeding 95th and 99th percentiles. The contribution of extreme precipitation to total precipitation increased during 1960–2012. Overall, occurrences of extreme precipitation are more concentrated in time. The weakening of the Asian summer monsoon strength and local topography had contribution to the variations of extreme precipitation over Yunnan. However, the forcing mechanisms are very complicated and need to be studied in subsequent work.