Spatiotemporal Variation of the Tourism Climate Index in the southern coasts of Iran

Tourism, as one of the main sectors of the global economy, is highly sensitive to climate and related changes. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the Spatiotemporal Variation of Tourism Climate Index (TCI) on the southern coasts of Iran.Design/methodology/approach: Therefore, the climatic parameters of the TCI index for 14 synoptic stations located in the coastal strip during a period of 25 years (1995-2014) were received from the Iran Meteorological Organization. After that, TCI values were calculated monthly for each of the stations to determine the suitable tourism areas in different months of the year. In the following, the trends of climatic parameters of temperature and precipitation as well as the TCI index in three important tourist destinations were investigated using Mann-Kendall non-parametric tests and the Innovative Trend Analysis (ITA) method in order to evaluate the temporal behavior of TCI.

The results showed that the most suitable times for tourism on the coasts of the Oman Sea are November, December, and March, and December and January on the coasts of the Persian Gulf. December has the most favorable tourist climate conditions and all the stations located on the coastal strip at this time are in the excellent category. The results of the trend test also indicate that TCI behavior is affected by increasing temperature changes and decreasing precipitation in the studied area; Based on ITA method, TCI in Bushehr has an increasing trend during the 4 months of January, February, March, and December in the good, very good, excellent, and ideal classes. This condition is observed in Kish only in January. In Chabahar, the TCI trend slope in December in the category of good, very good, and excellent is positive and the ideal category is decreasing.

In general, it can be said that during the period of 1995-2019, according to the spatial pattern of TCI, from late autumn to mid-winter in the coastal strip of southern Iran, tourism conditions are favorable and TCI is in excellent to very good conditions.Originality/value: In this study, for the first time, the ITA method was used to evaluate the tourism climate conditions in important southern coastal tourism destinations, and based on this method, the TCI changes in the studied stations are evaluated over a long period of time and according to the TCI classes.