FORECASTING DROUGHT WITH ARIMA MODEL AND STANDARDIZED PRECIPITATION INDEX (SPI)

Abstract

Drought forecasting is an important forecasting procedure for preparing and managing water resources for all creatures. Natural disasters across the regions such as flooding, earthquakes, droughts etc. have caused damages to life as a result of which numerous researches have been conducted to assist in reducing the phenomenon. Consequently, therefore, this study considered using Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model in forecasting drought using Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) as a forecasting tool which was used to measure and classify drought. The models are developed to forecast the SPI series. Results indicated the forecasting ability of the ARIMA models which increases as the timescales. The study is aimed at using ARIMA method for modeling SPI data series. The studies used data set made up of 624 months, obtained from 1954 to 2008. In the analysis only SPI3 series was non-seasonal while others have seasonality and Seasonal ARIMA was carried out, SPI12 was significant compared with the forecasting accuracy alongside the diagnostic checking having a minimum error of RMSE and MAE in both testing and training phases. The research contributes to the discovering of feasible forecasting of drought and demonstrates that the established model is good and appropriate for forecasting drought.