Abstract
Drought is an important phenomenon in recent years which caused a lot of problems for most of areas in Iran. Drought lead to water scarcity for people and this problem becomes one of the important challenges for the country. Karkheh River basin is one of the considerable water resources field in Iran and it is located in west parts of Iran. Current paper tries to take one step ahead toward scientific and practical drought management in Karkheh basin by analyzing hydrological drought. In this paper using daily discharge time series of 13 hydrometric stations which are located in the basin and also applying threshold level method, dry periods were extracted and results were analyzed. Results showed that the most volume and the most duration of drought in threshold level of 70% mostly happened within 1998-2000 and 2006-2008. Also the results of the frequency analysis of drought parameters indicted that for maximum deficit volume series Weibull distribution and Generalized Pareto Distribution (GP) in accordance with 77% of stations and for maximum duration series, GP distribution in accordance with 54% of stations had the most consistency. Based on this consistency, return period of droughts were also computed and the possibility of drought predictions in future was determined.
Highlights
Drought event is the most critical environmental phenomenon that has special hydrological and meteorological characteristics in each area (Samiei et al, 2006)[1]
One of the most common quantitative explanations of hydrological drought is based on introducing a threshold level which less than that for river flow is considered as hydrological drought (Tallaksen 2000)[9]
Study area Karkheh River basin is located in west part of Iran
Summary
Drought event is the most critical environmental phenomenon that has special hydrological and meteorological characteristics in each area (Samiei et al, 2006)[1]. In one general explanation drought means unnatural scarcity of rainfall in long-term periods This introduction is meaningful when the scarcity leads to lack of moisture in soil, decrease in water flow and interruption of human activity, plants and animal's life (Khazaei et al, 2003)[2]. Different types of drought are meteorological, hydrological, agricultural and socio-economic (Hisdal and Tallaksen 20003; Mishra and Singh 20104; Van Loon and Van Lanen 20125; Liu et al, 20126 and Choi et al, 20137). Among these different types of drought, investigation of the hydrological drought is too important due to dependence of most of the activities (including industrial, water and power plants) to surface water resources (Vasilides et al, 2011)[8]. One of the most common quantitative explanations of hydrological drought is based on introducing a threshold level which less than that for river flow is considered as hydrological drought (Tallaksen 2000)[9]
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