determination of tourism climate index in kerman province

climate is a natural resource that effects decision making for selection of destinations in tourism and ecotourism. therelationship between climate and tourism is a complex one. but application of a climate index provides an ideal approachto understanding this complexity and is a useful tool for the tourism industry. in this study, a modified version ofmieczkowski's (1985) tourism climate index (tci) for months was used for kerman province to determine climatecomfort ratings ranging from ideal to unfavorable. data covering a network of 12 meteorological stations was used tocompute a tci for the study region. then index evaluations in each city were classified according to one of the six annualtci distributions presented by scott and mcboyle (2001). results of modeling showed bimodal-shoulder peaks in sevenstations namely (anar, rafsanjan, zarand, sirjan, shahre-babak, bam and kerman); two stations namely (baft andlalehzar) had summer peak, and three cities (shahdad, kahnouj and jiroft) had winter peak. tci scores for all months inthe study stations were transferred into geographic information system to determine the most suitable areas and monthsfor tourism activities in kerman province.