Meteorological drought in the Hadley Centre global climate model is assessed using the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), a commonly used drought index. At interannual time scales, for the majority of the land surface, the model captures the observed relationship between the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and regions of relative wetness and dryness represented by high and low values of the PDS...

Drought is one of the natural phenomena which occurs in all climates in different parts of the world. Iran is located in the dry belt of the world. The increase of desertification, drought reoccurrence, and destruction by human in this geographical region needs more studies on spatial and temporal trend of rainfall. In this study, trends of climatic drought during 1975-76/ 2004-05 in seasonal a...

Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natu...

This study presents a comprehensive assessment of the variability and trends of the precipitation and temperature along with the trends in drought indices over the State of California. The non-parametric Mann–Kendall trend test is applied with a trend-free pre-whitening procedure in trend identification. A dataset containing 120-year (water years 1896–2015) monthly precipitation, average temper...

Assessing the uncertainties and understanding the deficiencies of climate models are fundamental to developing adaptation strategies. The objective of this study is to understand how well Coupled Model Intercomparison-Phase 5 (CMIP5) climate model simulations replicate ground-based observations of continental drought areas and their trends. The CMIP5 multimodel ensemble encompasses the Climatic...

Introduction Worldwide, economic damages attributed to natural disasters tripled from the 1960s The economic, social, and environmental costs and losses associated with drought are also increasing dramatically, although it is difficult to quantify this trend precisely because of the lack of reliable historical estimates of losses. White and Haas estimated in 1975 that the average annual crop lo...