Assessment of potential climate change impacts on drought indicators (Case study: Yazd station, Central Iran)

This research studies the potential impact of climate change on future trend and changes of two well known drought indicators namely RDI and SPI in Yazd meteorological station, in central part of Iran. For this purpose, data of HadCM3 model that were resulted from GCM-runs based on the IPCC-SRES scenarios of A2 and B2 were acquired and analyzed for projection of daily Tmin, Tmax and precipitation for the projected period of 2010 to 2039. RDI and SPI drought indicators then were calculated and validated based on corresponding observations of historical period (1961-1990). Comparison of the results indicate that SPI and RDI of A2 scenario would have a negative trend along with the projected years, while these indicators tend to have positive trend when resulted from B2 scenario. The latter result demonstrates an increase of vulnerabilities based on up coming droughts.