ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the spatial and temporal characteristics of historic meteorological drought events, and the effects of the data length on the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) drought category in the Upper Blue Nile (UBN) basin. It investigates whether climate records with shorter-length affect the assessment of drought events in terms of drought categories, before making use of all available observations to assess the spatial and temporal distributions of drought over the UBN Basin. The chapter shows the potential benefits of the SPI for drought assessment and examined the lag time between the hydrological and meteorological droughts. It analyses the effect of the length of rainfall time series data used on drought assessment with the aim to validate the use of a large number of stations with relatively shorter record length to investigate drought characteristics of the UBN Basin. The chapter assesses the spatio-temporal variation of drought in the UBN Basin, Ethiopia, using the SPI.
