Producing climate map for Kurdistan Province using information technology system

Climatic zoning and identifying influential factors and elements in each zone are considered to be the most important factor in environmental planning. Climatic research and climate map can be used in large, medium, small and local scales. Related researches in Kurdistan have been very limited. The present article investigates climatic features of Kurdistan province in a 30 year statistical period using weather stations and Information Technology System software. After qualitative and quantitate control of meteorological data and elimination of statistical deficiencies, two important climatic elements (temperature and precipitation) were investigated across the province. Afterwards, isothermal and isohyetal maps and the correlation between temperature and rainfall with altitude were produced using inverse distance weighting method. Conformity of temperature and rainfall with digital elevation model shows a significant inverse correlation between temperature, rainfall and altitude. So that with an increase in altitude, temperature and rainfall decreases. De Martonne and Embergent methods were used for climatic classification of the province. In De Martonne classification, Kurdistan province was divided into four climates, i.e. arid, Mediterranean, humid and very humid. Embergent method classified the area into four climates, i.e. cold semi-arid, highland climate, cold semi-humid and cold humid. Finally, zoning process was performed in GIS environment and inverse distance weighting method was used for spatial interpolation and spatial data analysis to produce Kurdistan climate map. Resulting zoning maps indicates that semi-arid and Mediterranean climate are dominant and only a small zone in the western parts has humid and semi-humid climate.