Çavuş, YoncaStahl, KerstinAksoy, Hafzullah2023-03-142023-03-1420222564-7784https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-022-03171-8Drought is increasingly gaining importance for society, humans, and the environment. It is analyzed commonly by the use of available hydroclimatic or hydrologic data with little in depth consideration of specifc major dry periods experienced over a region. Also, it is not a common practice to assess the probability of drought categories with a rolling time series and hence the changing knowledge for operational drought monitoring. A combination of such quantitative analysis with a comprehensive qualitative assessment of drought as a human-water relation aimed to fll this gap performing a case study in the Seyhan River Basin, Turkey. Six major dry periods were identifed from the precipitation time series of 19 meteorological stations. Major dry periods were analyzed by rolling time series and full time series, and they were also analyzed individually. A major dry period could be impor tant in terms of its duration while another in terms of its severity or intensity, and each with its own impact on the human-water relations that can be infuential on the drought mitigation, management and governance. Signifcantly higher probabilities were calculated for extreme droughts with the use of individual major dry periods. An important outcome from the study is that drought is underestimated in practice with the sole use of the whole data record.enMeteorological droughtRolling time seriesSeyhan River BasinSpatiotemporal analysisStandardized precipitation indexArticle10.1007/s11269-022-03171-82-s2.0-85130226465N/AWOS:000799557500001Q1