DrinC

Drought Indices Calculator

Getting Started Guide

Version 1.5
National Technical University of Athens
Centre for the Assessment of Natural Hazards & Proactive Planning
& Lab. of Reclamation Works and Water Resources Management

Supervisor: Prof. George Tsakiris

Software development: Dimitris Tigkas
Research Team: D. Tigkas, H. Vangelis, D. Pangalou

Contact information:
9 Iroon Polytechniou
15780, Athens - Greece
e-mail: drinc@ewra.net

http://drinc.ewra.net/

DrinC - Getting Started Guide is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

© 2004–2013. D. Tigkas.
Getting Started Guide 3

Introduction
DrinC (Drought Indices Calculator) aims at providing a user-friendly
tool for the calculation of several drought indices, with emphasis on
two recently developed ones: the Reconnaissance Drought Index
(RDI) and the Streamflow Drought Index (SDI). Also, the widely used
Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Rainfall Deciles can be
calculated. The common characteristic of the selected indices is that
they require relatively small number of data for their calculation and
the results can be easily interpreted and used in strategic planning
and operational applications. DrinC has full graphical user interface
functionality (GUI) and runs on MS Windows operating systems.

Software installation
The recommended system requirements for DrinC are a Pentium 4
processor PC with 128MB of RAM and a version of MS Excel® (97 or
higher) installed.
Run “DrinC setup.exe” application to initialise the software setup and
follow the instructions of the wizard to complete the installation
process.
4 DrinC

Data input
The required input data are shown in the following Table:
Index Required input data
Rainfall Deciles Precipitation
RDI Precipitation, PET (or temperature)
SPI Precipitation
SDI Streamflow

DrinC provides a module for the

calculation of potential evapo-
transpiration (PET) with tempe-
rature based methods:
ƒ Hargreaves (Tmin, Tmax)
ƒ Thornthwaite (Tmean)
ƒ Blaney – Criddle (Tmean)
Note that a series of at least 30 years period of data must be
available in order to produce reliable results for drought
characterisation.
Input and output files are in MS Excel® 97-2003 format (*xls). It is
important to transform files with newer format (*.xlsx) to 97-2003 by
using the relevant ‘save as…’ option in MS Excel®, otherwise the data
Getting Started Guide 5

will not be loaded properly.

For the calculation of the indices in annual basis, data may be either
annual or monthly, while for calculations in seasonal basis (monthly,
3-months, 6-months or other time step), monthly data are required.
Regarding the monthly data files, the software is able to recognize
automatically the position of the data and to ignore other information
included in the file. The file format should contain a line with the
name of the months (at least the first letter of each month) of the
water year (October – September or September – August). The data
of each water year are placed in lines under the respective month.
Annual data should be placed in one column (one value per year).
The data files are selected in the File Management window
(menu>Data>File Management).

In this window Rainfall and Potential Evapotranspiration (PET) files

are defined, as well as the water year period, the first year and the
number of the years of the dataset. If data are on annual basis, the
cell where the value of the first year is located should also be defined
by the user (e.g. Row: 9, Column: 3).
The layout of the input data file is shown in the following Figure (file
6 DrinC

templates can be also found at DrinC website):

Examples of the file format (monthly and annual datasets)

Calculation Process
The settings for the calculation of the drought indices are defined in
the Indices window (menu>Process>Calculate Indices).
By ticking in the relevant boxes, each index (or all indices at once)
will be calculated. The outputs may be saved either in separate files
by defining the name of the output files in the respective text boxes,
or in the same file for all the indices if the annual calculation step is
selected and the ‘One output file’ box is checked. For each index
there are different output options.
Getting Started Guide 7

The primary reference base in DrinC is the hydrological year (October

– September), therefore the default calculation period starts from
October and the main time steps
are monthly, 3-months, 6-months
and annual. However, it is
possible to define other time
steps (e.g. 4-months) or starting
months (e.g. January). Also there
is the option to calculate the
drought indices sequentially for
each month and the output may
be presented per month or per
period in order to have a direct comparison of drought severity of
specific periods for each year.
With the ‘multi-points mode’ function, a set of input data for several
spatial points can be loaded and each drought index can be calculated
for each point through an iterative routine.
The produced output files can be displayed in the ‘Results Tables’
window and can be saved in MS Excel® worksheets.
 National Technical University of Athens
Centre for the Assessment of Natural Hazards & Proactive Planning
& Lab. of Reclamation Works and Water Resources Management

April, 2013