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Evaluation of meteorological drought using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) in the High Ziz River basin, Morocco

Abstract One of the adverse impacts of climate change is drought, and the complex nature of droughts makes them one of the most important climate hazards. Drought indices are generally used as a tool for monitoring changes in meteorological, hydrological, agricultural and economic conditions. In this study, we focused on meteorological drought events in the High Ziz river Basin, central High Atlas, Morocco. The application of drought index analysis is useful for drought assessment and to consider methods of adaptation and mitigation to deal with climate change. In order to analyze drought in the study area, we used two different approaches for addressing the change in climate and particularly in precipitation, i) to assess the climate variability and change over the year, and ii) to assess the change within the year timescale (monthly, seasonally and annually) from 1971 to 2017. In first approach, precipitation data were used in a long time scale e.g. annual and more than one-year period. For this purpose, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was considered to quantify the rainfall deficit for multiple timescales. For the second approach, trend analysis (using the Mann-Kendall (M-K) test) was applied to precipitation in different time scales within the year. The results showed that the study area has no significant trend in annual rainfall, but in terms of seasonal rainfall, the magnitude of rainfall during summer revealed a positive significant trend in three stations. A significant negative and positive trend in monthly rainfall was observed only in April and August, respectively.