Abstract: In order to study the general rule of meteorological drought characteristics and to observe the variation of standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index in Zhengzhou over the past hundred years,the monthly standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index from 1901 to 2015 in Zhengzhou was collected, and the variation trend and abrupt change of regional standardized precipitation index were tested by Mann-Kendall test method. Based on the monthly standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index and the run-length theory, the drought events were identified,and three characteristic variables of drought duration,drought intensity and drought intensity peak were separated. Three two-dimensional symmetric Copula functions and three threedimensional symmetric Copula functions were selected to fit the characteristic variables of drought and calculate the joint return periods and co-occurrence return periods of drought characteristic variables. Through the fitting test, the joint distribution fitting of two-dimensional Frank Copula function and three-dimensional Frank Copula function demonstrate the best fitting effect on the joint distribution of drought characteristic variables.