Aridity trends in the Middle East and adjacent areas
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Aridity trends in the Middle East and adjacent areas Hossein Sahour 1
&
Mehdi Vazifedan 2 & Fahad Alshehri 3
Received: 17 June 2020 / Accepted: 26 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Available water resources in the Middle East, as one of the most water-scarce regions of the world, have undergone extra pressure due to climatic change, population growth, and economic development during the past decades. The objective of this study is to detect the trends and quantify the changes in aridity with respect to precipitation and potential evapotranspiration in 20 countries of the Middle East and the adjacent area. A pixel-wise trend analysis was conducted on precipitation, potential evapotranspiration, and the aridity index for 71 years from 1948 to 2018. Results showed a statistically significant (|Z| > 1.96) increase up to 106% in aridity (a downward trend in the aridity index) from December to September in most parts of the region. Aridity in October and November had a downward tendency in most parts of the study area. At an annual time scale, 62.5% of the detected trends in aridity were found to be upward (up to 96% increase) due to the combined effects of the decrease in precipitation and the increase in potential evapotranspiration. Annual aridity was found to be downward in 37.5% of the detected trends (up to 61% decrease). The highest and the lowest trends in aridity were found in the north of Sudan (96%) and eastern Arabia (− 61%).
1 Introduction The global rise in greenhouse gasses is one of the major causes of the change in climate variables (e.g., temperature, evapotranspiration, and precipitation) (Bryan 1996; Wang et al. 2014; Chen and Dong 2019; Mudelsee 2019; Douville et al. 2002). In recent years, several studies have reported compelling evidence on the impact of climate change on water resources across the globe (Bouraoui et al. 1999; Kamga 2001; Risbey 2011; Ziervogel et al. 2019; Said et al. 2019; Schilling et al. 2020; Soto-Navarro et al. 2020). Significant shifts have occurred in the water cycle due to the combined effects of climate change and human activities in many parts of the world. Such changes eventually alter water resource distribution (Oki and Kanae 2006; Pradhan et al. 2019; Llopart et al. 2020).
* Hossein Sahour [email protected] 1
Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA
2
Department of Statistics, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA
3
Geology and Geophysics Department, King Saud University, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia
Aridity is defined as the degree to which a climate lacks adequate, life-promoting moisture (Glickman Todd and Zenk 2000). Aridity is the outcome of dry and descending air. Therefore, aridity is often found in areas where anticyclonic conditions are persistent, as is the case in the regions lying under the anticyclones of the subtropics (Some’e et al. 2013). An aridity index can measure the intensity of aridity
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