Assessment of areal interpolation methods for spatial analysis of SPI and EDI drought indices.

Akhari, Rouhangiz; Morid, saed; Mahdian, Mohammad Hossain; Smakhtin, Vladimir

The article presents a study on the assessment of areal interpolation methods for spatial analysis of Standardized Precipitation Index and Effective Drought Index at climatic stations in Tehran, Iran. It states that drought monitoring is an important component of drought risk management and drought indices are often used for monitoring purposes. It notes that the drought indices may only be calculated at a limited number of sites where observations on climate variables are available. It also mentions that several geostatistical methods were assessed to derive the map of drought indices including kriging, co-kriging, thin plate smoothing splines with and without secondary variables, as well as Thiessen polygons and weighted moving average.

TEHRAN (Iran); IRAN; DROUGHTS; ENVIRONMENTAL monitoring; ENVIRONMENTAL indicators; DISASTERS; KRIGING; SPLINE theory; INTERPOLATION; VORONOI polygons; SPATIAL analysis (Statistics); METEOROLOGICAL stations; MANAGEMENT

International Journal of Climatology, 2009, Vol 29, Issue 1, p135

0899-8418

Academic Journal

10.1002/joc.1691