Development of a New Multivariate Composite Drought Index for the Blue Nile River Basin

Drought is a slow-onset phenomenon that evolves over season or even years. affects people more than any other natural disaster due to its widespread and significant negative impacts. Population growth associated water demand add further stress on resources, especially in periods of drought. indices represent single value resulting from processing considerable amount data. These provide short message stakeholders adapt resource management strategies. Since drought results interconnected phenomena, designing composite index includes several can accurately capture events. assessment large-scale basin (e.g., the Blue Nile) challenging objective has not been deeply tackled before except for small portions basin. This paper assessed droughts whole by evaluating meteorological, agricultural, hydrological indices. The calculated (Standardized Runoff Index (SRI), Standardized Precipitation (SPI), standardized soil moisture (SSI)) addition development new evapotranspiration (sETI) are jointly integrated into novel Nile (BNI). optimal weights SPI, SRI, sETI, SSI were 0.33, 0.26, 0.2, 0.19, respectively, designed BNI.