ABSTRACT

Over the last two decades, Iran has suffered from significant droughts mainly due to mismanagement or nonmanagement of water resources. Quantifying drought is of great importance for drought risk management, especially in arid and semiarid regions such as Iran. Various indices have been presented for drought monitoring worldwide; however, none of them, on its own, could resolve the needs of different drought researches in Iran. In a part of this chapter, application of drought indices in Iran has been regarded. Next, in order to better understand droughts for short- and long-term planning of water resources, we deal with several statistical techniques used in forecasting, frequency analysis, and regionalization of droughts in different parts of the country. Climate change, as one of the human concerns in the twenty-first century, and its impacts on drought characteristics in Iran have also been discussed. Almost all examples presented in this chapter are those that have been conducted in different parts of Iran. Therefore, this chapter provides a full picture of drought modeling in Iran. By looking carefully at this picture and comparing its practical achievements with drought impacts in different parts of Iran in recent years, we found that drought crisis is still an unresolved problem in the country.