Evaluation of Global Gridded Precipitation Datasets for Drought Monitoring (Case Study: Great Karoon Watershed)

In this study, the Spatio-temporal performance of 5 global gridded precipitation datasets including GPCC V8, CHIRPS V2, ECMWF ERA5, NASA MERRA2, and PERSIANN-CDR (PCDR) in drought monitoring has been evaluated. For this purpose, the standardized precipitation index (SPI) and precipitation information of 13 synoptic stations of the Meteorological Organization of Iran during the thirty years of 1987-2016 has been used. Comparisons were carried out based on performance indices include correlation, mean square root error (RMSE), Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient, and modified agreement index (MAI) as well as drought detection accuracy metrics including False Alarm Ratio (FAR), probability of detection (POD) and the Critical Success Index (CSI). The results showed that GPCC, ERA5, PCDR datasets had a strong agreement with SPI observations so that they showed the drought trends and situations well and their R2 with observational SPI was