Analysing Drought Past Trend and Forecasting its Future in Isfahan Province

The geographical location of Isfahan province has led the province to be at risk of drought. One of the ways to mitigate drought is evaluation and monitoring of drought based on indices that can determine its intensity and permanence in each region. In this research, for drought and trend analysis standard precipitation index and Mann-Kendall test were used, respectively. Also, monthly precipitation time series of Isfahan province was applied to forecast drought from 1970 to 2009. For this purpose, Box and Jenkins modeling approach (1976) was used which has three main steps, namely model identification, parameter estimation, goodness of fit test or time independency and normal test of residual. The results showed that most of the stations in Isfahan province were faced with severe drought in the year 2000 and this situation was repeated one more time in 2008. Also, the results brought forth multiplicative models in all the stations. ARIMA (1,0,0) (0,1,1) showed the highest correlations between control and forecast data in Isfahan, Meime and Ardestan stations, and the model ARIMA (0,0,1) (0,1,1) displayed the highest correlation between control and forecasted data in Naein, Freydoonshahr, Khansar and Natanz. These models were selected as the best models through which the amount of precipitation was predicted till 2015. The trend of forecast data across Isfahan province showed that in most months the trend is not significant.