The quantitative analysis of drought is crucial essential for drought risk assessment. The standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) has been widely used as an effective approach to quantitatively analyze the trends, duration, frequency, and severity of drought. However, how to calculate the evapotranspiration is big challenge for the reliable and accuracy of SPEI results. The most previous studies calculated SPEI based on an empirical evapotranspiration equation, such as the Thornthwaite method, rather than the physical Penman-Monteith equation. Moreover, majority of the studies analyzed the spatio-temporal pattern of the index without linkage of the relationship between the climactic drought index and actual cropland drought areas. This study utilized SPEI based on the Penman-Monteith equation to explore the variations of drought frequency and duration during 1963-2014 in 3H Plain, and established the relationship between SPEI and the actual field drought areas by Pearson correlation in Henan, Hebei, and Shandong Province separately, which aims to understand the trends of drought during the past 50 years and to explore the relationship between the climatic drought index and actual field drought areas. The results showed that the SPEI had upward trend for 1, 3, 6, and 12-month scales in most areas of the 3H Plain while as the 1-month and 3-month scales, the wetting trend was significant (P < 0.1) in the northern regions of 3H Plain. Drought frequency in the 1960s was the highest during the past 54 years, but lowest in 2000-2014. The longest duration was occurred in the 1960s by comparing the decadal spatial distribution of drought duration. Moreover, the mean drought duration declined from 2.6 months in the 1960s to 1.5 months during 2000-2014. The changes of annual drought areas decreased in Henan, Hebei, and Shandong Province, which could be partly attributed to the lower frequency and shorter duration of drought detected by SPEI. Correlation analyses indicated that the index series of Dec-SPEI-12 had medium to high correlation with observed cropland drought areas. For example, Pearson's r between Dec-SPEI-12 and the drought area of Shandong Province were -0.7, -0.7, and -0.8 for affected, disaster and no harvest drought areas, respectively. The results of the study suggest a wetting trend in the 3H Plain during the past 54 years, and the chosen of Penman-Monteith evapotranspiration model with decreasing evapotranspiration over the past years in the 3H Plain attributes to this wetting trend. The high correlation between the climatic drought index and actual drought area indicated that SPEI could be used as a reference or trigger for establishing a drought warning system in the 3H Plain.