Journal of Applied Research in Geographical Sciences

Abstract

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Frequency Analysis of Daily Droughts in Iran by Using Effective Drought Index

firooz mojarad

Iran's Potential for the occurrence of drought at various severities illuminates the need to examine this phenomenon with new indexes. The major deficiency of the current indexes is that they cannot monitor the droughts in daily scale. Effective Drought Index (EDI) overcomes this defect. The goal of this study is to analyze the frequency of daily droughts by EDI in 43 synoptic stations in a 30-year period. Accordingly, the frequency of daily droughts in the stations was calculated by EDI during the seasons and the year. Then the stations were divided into five groups using cluster analysis based on total frequency of mild to most severe droughts (categories 1 to 4), and frequency patterns in each group were examined. The results showed that the most severe droughts have not happened in the stations except for Gorgan, Zanjan and Torbat-Heydariyeh. In contrast, the frequencies of mild, moderate and severe droughts, all being equal, are much more than most severe droughts, and their frequencies are almost equal. In 56 percent of the days, a variety of droughts (mild to most severe) has occurred in the whole country. Based on the output maps, frequency distribution of droughts in the country does not follow a certain geographical pattern, so it could be cocluded that all types of droughts have happened in all regions of the country. However, maximum total frequency of daily droughts (mild to most severe) is observed in the east and center parts. The decrease in the EDI values over time shows the tendency of the most stations towards drought.

Disaster Management and Identification of Safe and Hazardous Landslide Zones in Rural Areas of Sarwabad County

Iran's rural settlements, in spite of their comprehensive and multi-faceted developments in the last decades, are still considered to be among the settlements faced with crucial challenges in the face of environmental hazards. As a result, prearrangement for upcoming events and disasters, as well as paying attention to the management of rural disaster in dealing with particularly natural events turn out to be necessary. The rural areas of Sarwabad, in Kurdistan, are also considered among the areas susceptible to natural disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, and landslides. The purpose of the research is the identification of settlements, and safe and hazardous landslide zones with particular focus on disaster management in Sarwabad. This research is methodologically analytical and essentially functional, and, by using geographical information system (GIS) and the analytical hierarchical process (AHP), the researchers analyzed the data and the layers and provided the ultimate version of combined hazard maps and also overlaying maps for the purpose of factorial assessment. The findings have been in the form of spatio-populatory analysis of the settlements, and resulted in identifying the safe and unsafe villages and zones. Moreover, it is found that nearly 46 percent of the rural population and 31 villages of the area are located in safe or low-hazard-level landslides, while the rest of the settlements and rural population are located in the mid and high-hazard-level zones and, as such, are need to be secured in these zones.

Capacity assesment of urban development on natural substrates using the fuzzy operators and FAHP model in Ghaffar catchment

ali movahed