Regional Drought Modes in Iran Using the SPI: The Effect of Time Scale and Spatial Resolution

Tayeb Raziei (), Isabella Bordi () and Luis Pereira ()

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2013, vol. 27, issue 6, 1674 pages

Abstract: In the present paper, regional drought modes in Iran are identified applying the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Varimax rotation to the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) computed on different time scales. Data used include gridded monthly precipitation covering the period 1951–2007 retrieved from the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) archive with different spatial resolutions (2.5, 1 and 0.5° resolution). The objective of the study is twofold: (i) Investigate the stability of drought spatial modes as a function of the SPI time scales used for monitoring the different kinds of drought, (ii) Evaluate the impact of the spatial resolution of gridded data on drought regionalization. For the coarse spatial resolution of 2.5°, results show four drought modes of distinct variability, which remain quite stable when the SPI time scale is varied from 1- to 24-month. Differently, for higher spatial resolutions drought modes appear more sensitive to the index time scale and become less spatially homogeneous as the time scale is increased. Moreover, the number of identified modes (sub-regions) may reduce to three or two, but in all cases the most well defined sub-region appears to be the southern one. This suggests that both the spatial resolution of precipitation data and the time scale may affect drought regionalization, i.e. the number of drought modes and their spatial homogeneity. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013

Keywords: Drought regionalization; SPI; Iran; GPCC gridded data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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DOI: 10.1007/s11269-012-0120-3

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