Zoning of Hydrogeological Drought Severity in Arid Regions and It’s Relaion with Meteorological Drought (case study: Garmsar Plain)

Groundwater is important water resource supply, especially in arid and semi- arid regions. Increased utilization of the ground water aquifer leads to significant reduction in the storage of reservoirs. This study evaluates the hydrogeological drought in Garmsar plain using Groundwater Resource Index (GRI). First, we used 17 piezometric wells data over 2001-2011 statistical period to calculate GRI in the beginning, middle and end of the period. So, we used different interpolation method including geostatiscal method ordinary kriging (OK), simple kriging (SK) and deterministic methods including inverse distance weighting (IDW) to prepare the maps over three periods. The mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) indices were used to evaluate the accuracy of simple kriging, ordinary kriging and IDW classification based on the drought maps. The results showed that the values of MAE and RMSE criteria for simple Kriging is better than the other methods and indicates the suitability of this method for zoning GRI. According to the results, the most severe hydrogeological drought in Garmsar plain was at the end of 2011, that 91.16 % of the study area was suffered from severe drought. SPI was used for considering the effects of meteorological drought in the time scale of 3, 6, 9, 12, 24 and 48 months on groundwater. The correlation between SPI and GRI showed long-term timescale of 48 monthly has the greatest correlation with groundwater level.