Assessing the performance of various meteorological drought indices in capturing historic droughts in the south of Algeria

Meteorological drought is a natural hazard that can occur under all climatic regimes. The drought monitoring is a vital and important part of predicting and analyzing the drought impacts. Due to the fact that no single index can represent all facets of meteorological drought, a multi-index approach was used for drought monitoring in this investigation. The ability of eight precipitation-based drought indices was assessed based on analyzing the historical meteorological data (1988–2019) of In Guezzam in the South of Algeria. Those indices are the standardized precipitation index (SPI), percent of normal index (PNI), deciles index (DI), and Z-score index (ZSI), the dry flow index (ISD), normalized hydrological index (IHN), log-decimal index of hydrological deviations (ILDH), and precipitation deciles (PD). Thus, the methodology is tested on a real-world system which allows assessing its applicability within a Drought Watch System in river basins with significant storage works. The obtained results highlighted that the selection of database was more important than the selection of drought index and that the best combinations were the PD, PNI, and DI calculated with SPI and ZSI. © 2021, Saudi Society for Geosciences.