ANALYZING SPATIO-TEMPORAL VARIABILITY IN DROUGHTS FOR NORTHERN AREA AND KPK

Abstract

Now a days, humanities are facing environmental challenges due to drought hazards that occurring frequently. Drought impacts greatly in country’s environment, the community and industries. In Pakistan, like many other hazards, several adverse impacts of drought hazard are continued. However, early measurement and detection of drought help for water resources and management to employ drought mitigation’s policies. Therefore, spatial temporal variability in droughts of 17 stations of Northern Area and KPK are investigated in this research. Monthly time series data durring 1974-2012 on precipitation and temperature is used to obtain extreme drought, severe drought, moderate drought, slight drought and non-drought conditions. Beside this, during the evaluation study of drought assessment tools, we proposed a new multi-scalar tool for assessment of drought. Results show that proposed drought index peform better to determine drought level with compare to another drought indices for low temperature regions. Ordinary Kriging method is used for mapping spatial distributions of droughts. For this perpose, several veriogram models for different time scale were assessed by fitting variograms using all drought indices. By assuming that the standardized self-correlation coefficient as weights based on the special characteristics of drought occurrence being a dependent stochastic variable, a weighted Markov chain model applied to forecast future state of drought. For early warning and detection of drought, Artificial Neural Network method is also prepared for characterizing and prediction of droughts