Drought hazard depending on elevation and precipitation in Lorestan, Iran
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Drought hazard depending on elevation and precipitation in Lorestan, Iran Tahereh Sadat Mirmohammad Hosseini 1
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& Seyed Abbas Hosseini & Bagher Ghermezcheshmeh & Ahmad Sharafati
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Received: 8 April 2020 / Accepted: 13 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Drought is a type of destructive hydro-climatic disaster that has a significant impact on agriculture and natural resources. Meteorological drought features, including severity, duration, and peak, exhibit various patterns in different climatic regions and geographical conditions. Several indices have been developed to assess the drought potential of different areas across the world, among which the drought hazard index (DHI) is one of the most commonly employed for semi-arid and the flat regions. This study investigates the effects of the elevation and precipitation on DHI, which has received little attention in previous studies. For this purpose, DHIs were computed for 15 stations located at different elevations of the study area over 31 years by considering the occurrence of various drought classes with different weights. The results showed that the elevation and mean precipitation both have inverse effects on the DHI in the study area, which means that the DHI increases when the elevation and mean precipitation are low. The results of the estimation of the DHI for three different periods (i.e., 6, 9, and 12 months) revealed that a 9-month period is optimum for DHI estimations in terms of the reliability of the results.
1 Introduction Drought is an extreme natural event that harms nature, human society, and economies (Mishra and Singh 2010; Qutbudin et al. 2019; Riebsame 2019). The adverse effects of extreme events like drought and flood include a reduction of agricultural production, the destruction of rivers and lakes, and an increase in stress imposed on natural vegetation (Sharafati and Pezeshki 2020). The impacts of drought on water resources, agriculture, and vegetation are especially crucial in arid and semi-arid regions due to their low and non-uniform rainfall (Mazid et al. 2005; Van Dijk et al. 2013; Emadodin et al. 2019; Homsi et al. 2020). The success of drought mitigation highly depends on longterm data. The drought data can be obtained through drought monitoring, which is typically provided based on the drought indices. Decision-makers use those indices to provide the * Seyed Abbas Hosseini [email protected] 1
Department of Civil Engineering, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
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Soil Conservation and Watershed Management Institute, Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREEO), Tehran, Iran
mitigation measures (Morid et al. 2006). Droughts can be defined as meteorological droughts, hydrological droughts, agricultural droughts, and economic droughts (Heim Jr 2002; Dai et al. 2004; Bates et al. 2008; Agana and Homaifar 2018). Meteorological droughts are the basis of all other kinds of droughts. Hence, meteorolog
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