Evaluation of Geostatistics Methods of Drought Severity Zonation in Fars Province

Article abstract:Drought is one of the most important natural hazards that affects many countries all over the world and causes socio-economic, political and cultural problems. Awareness of and ability to forecast drought may help to reduce its consequences. In this research some geostatistical methods including simple kriging(SK), ordinary kriging, inverse distance weighing (IDW) of 1 to 5 degrees for drought severity mapping in the Province of Fars in 2007 using the percentage of normal index. Comparison of results based on RMSE and MAE showed that Using the SK method resulted in the lowest values (RMSE= 11.44 and MAE=6.94), the refores it was selected as the most appropriate method for drought severity mapping in the mentioned year. Based on the prepared map, the province of Fars suffered showed two classes of drought, severe and very severe, drought which covered 21.58 and 78.42, respectively, of the Province area