A nonparametric multivariate standardized drought index for characterizing socioeconomic drought: A case study in the Heihe River Basin

•MSRRI combines inflow-demand reliability index (IDR) and water storage resilience index (WSR).•MSRRI has better performance in assessing socioeconomic droughts than IDR and WSR.•Linkages between socioeconomic droughts and ENSO/AO were explored.•ENSO and AO contribute to the socioeconomic drought changes in the Heihe River Basin. Among various drought types, socioeconomic drought is the least investigated type of droughts. Most existing drought indicators ignore the role of local reservoirs and water demand in coping with climatic extremes. In this study, a Multivariate Standardized Reliability and Resilience Index (MSRRI) combining inflow-demand reliability index (IDR) and water storage resilience index (WSR) was applied to examine the evolution characteristics of the socioeconomic droughts in the Heihe River Basin, the second largest inland river basin in northwestern China. Furthermore, the cross wavelet analysis was adopted to explore the associations between annual MSRRI series and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)/Atlantic Oscillation (AO). Results indicated that: (1) the developed MSRRI is more sensitive to the onset and termination of socioeconomic droughts than IDR and WSR, owing to its joint distribution function of IDR and WSR, responding to changes in either or both of the indices; (2) the MSRRI series in the Heihe River Basin shows non-significant trends at both monthly and annual scales; (3) both ENSO and AO contribute to the changes in the socioeconomic droughts in the Heihe River Basin, and the impacts of ENSO on the socioeconomic droughts are stronger than those of AO.