Recent trends in atmospheric evaporative demand in Southwest Iran: implications for change in drought severity
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Recent trends in atmospheric evaporative demand in Southwest Iran: implications for change in drought severity Mahshid Karimi 1 & Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano 2 & Fergus Reig 2 & Kaka Shahedi 1 & Tayeb Raziei 3 & Mirhassan Miryaghoubzadeh 4 Received: 4 September 2019 / Accepted: 6 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study evaluates trends in climatic variables, atmospheric evaporative demand (AED) and meteorological drought between 1988 and 2018 over the southwest of Iran, where the Karkheh Basin is located. For this purpose, we used monthly time series of meteorological variables (precipitation, air temperature, wind speed and sunshine duration). The AED was estimated by the FAO-56 Penman-Monteith equation and drought severity by the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). There have been significant changes in the climate over the study domain, including a large increase in air temperature and wind speed and a decrease in relative humidity, which have driven a positive trend in the AED. The SPEI for the region has fallen, with the decrease being larger than the magnitude of change observed with the SPI. This suggests an increase in drought severity mostly associated with the rise in AED. The implications for water availability and climate change processes in the region are discussed. Keywords Drought . SPI . SPEI . FAO-56 Penman-Monteith . Karkheh basin . Iran
1 Introduction Drought is one of the most damaging climatic hazards, with a heavy impact on agriculture, the economy, ecosystems, energy, human health, recreation, water resources, etc. (Mishra and Singh 2010; Vicente-Serrano 2016; Wilhite and Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03349-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Mahshid Karimi [email protected] 1
Department of Water Engineering, University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, Sari, Iran
2
Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología, Spanish National Research Council (IPE-CSIC), 5, 50059 Zaragoza, Spain
3
Soil Conservation and Watershed Management Research Institute (SCWMRI), Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREO), Tehran, Iran
4
Department of Rangeland and Watershed Management, University of Urmia, Urmia, Iran
Pulwarty 2017). In general, drought is mostly determined by precipitation variability, with the main cause being an unusual shortage of precipitation leading to reductions in soil moisture, runoff and groundwater (McKee et al. 1993). In the last two decades, some studies have emphasized that variables other than precipitation may have a significant role in intensifying droughts (Trenberth et al. 2014), among which the most important one is atmospheric evaporative demand (AED). It has been suggested that the increase in AED is the main driver of more severe droughts worldwide (Dai 2013; Dai et al. 2018; Zhao and
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