Assessing the severity of climatic and hydrologic droughts in Chaghalvandi basin

Identification of drought and wet periods has an important role in water resources management. In this paper, climatic and hydrologic droughts were evaluated using SPI and SWI indices in Chghalvandi Watershed. The Data used in this study included 18-year climatic and hydrometric data obtained from 8 climatic and 2 hydrometric stations and also groundwater level data. Drought area delineation was made by ArcGIS kriging method, while the linear trend of the phenomena was assessed using Minitab and Makesen softwares. The results showed that magnitude and duration of drought have been considerable in recent years. Comparison of the climatic and hydrologic droughts represented a lag time between these two types of droughts. Drought area delineation maps revealed more severity of the hydrologic and climatic droughts in the southern and central parts of the study area.