Assessment of Future Agricultural and Meteorological Droughts of Climatic Regions of Iran Using Machine Learning Algorithm
Sara Lotfi
2025
Drought, as one of the most significant climatic hazards in Iran,
has intensified in frequency and severity in recent decades under the influence
of global warming and altered precipitation patterns. Accurate understanding of
the temporal and spatial behavior of drought and forecasting its future trends
plays a fundamental role in sustainable water resources management and national
food security. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate meteorological
and agricultural droughts in Iran using CMIP6 climate models and machine
learning algorithms, and to analyze their future changes under different
emission scenarios up to the mid-twenty-first century. In the first step, to
select the optimal models from all available CMIP6 models for the climatic variables
of precipitation, mean, maximum, and minimum temperature, the multi-criteria
decision-making method TOPSIS was employed based on weighting five evaluation
indices: MAE, MBE, NRMSE, NSE, and R.
The ranking results indicated that the CMIP6 models including
NorESM2-MM, TaiESM1, and AWI-CM-1-1-MR exhibited the best performance in
simulating precipitation; NorESM2-MM, TaiESM1, and EC-Earth3-CC for mean
temperature; EC-Earth3-CC, FIO-ESM-2-0, and MPI-ESM1-2-LR for maximum
temperature; and GFDL-ESM4, MRI-ESM2-0, and EC-Earth3-CC for minimum
temperature achieved the most accurate simulation results. The output data from
these models, after spatial downscaling (Nearest) and bias correction using the
quantile mapping method, were employed for calculating drought indices and
training predictive models. Subsequently, the LSTM recurrent neural network was
trained for simulation and forecasting, with 70% of the data allocated to
training and 30% to testing for precipitation and potential evapotra iration
(estimated using the FAO-56 Penman-Monteith method), and 80% to training and
20% to testing for drought indices.
Performance evaluation of the LSTM model demonstrated its high
capability in reproducing the spatiotemporal behavior of drought indices; the
NSE value for SPEI exceeded 0.90 and for SPI exceeded 0.6 at most stations.
Model errors in estimating precipitation ranged from 2.5 to 84 mm at Zabol and
Anzali stations, and for potential evapotra iration from 11 mm at Anzali to
39 mm at Abadan, indicating high accuracy and stability of the model in arid
and semi-arid regions of the country. Comparison of indices showed that SPEI,
due to accounting for temperature and water balance, provides a more accurate
representation of actual agricultural drought conditions compared to SPI.