Spatiotemporal assessment of military (defense) climatic suitability in the border areas of West Azerbaijan province, Iran

Due to the importance of border areas in national security and the impact of weather conditions on success, failure and efficiency of military activities in borders, military (defense) climate comfort assessment for military purposes in the Iranian border areas are essential to outline the defense climate conditions and establish contingency plans for the weather condition. So the aim of this study is to spatiotemporally assess the military weather condition in the West Azerbaijan province with the special focus on its international borders in order to outline the defense climate comfort. The historical (30 years) data on important elements for military operations for the 9 selected synoptic stations was obtained and then analyzed using the adaptive defense climate index (DCI).Then, the temporal (monthly) desirability of defense climate were determined quantitatively, qualitatively and spatially and finally the military climate comfort maps for the whole province and particularly for the border areas were extracted and analyzed. The results indicated that among the studied synoptic stations, the unfavorable (28.8 %) and very unfavorable (2.8 %) categories are the most and least frequent DCI’ descriptive categories respectively. The results showed that November, October, March, February, January and December provided the most comfortable climate for military activities, but August, July and June have the lowest values of DCI. Analyzing the spatiotemporal destitution of the assumptive border military bases within DCI’ categories showed that they located mostly in the acceptable (27.17%), unfavorable (25.17 %), good (20.82 %) and marginal (18.21 %) categories. Also the studied international border line experienced very unfavorable defense climate comfort in June and August but had proper defense climate comfort in October, November and December.The good, acceptable, marginal and unfavorable descriptive categories of DCI were common among all stations, but the very unfavorable descriptive category was observed only in Salmas and Maku stations.