Meteorological drought is a natural hazard that can occur under all climatic regimes. Monitoring the drought is a vital and important part of predicting and analyzing drought impacts. In the present study, monthly time series of rainfall data (1980–2016) from five stations were used to derive SPI, particularly at 3-month time scales. This 3-month SPI was interpolated to depict temporal patterns of meteorological drought and its severity during 2014 and 2016 years. SPI was more efficient than departure in spatial analysis of drought. An average of 11 years was negative departure on the SPI in north-east season and also northern part of the station had recorded large deficient (-99 % to - 60 %) of the year drought condition. Rainfall deviations included both positive and negative deviations and shown large variation in distribution of rainfall in all the stations. Hence, it was concluded that integration and analysis of drought identified areas from these indices, help in correctly identifying the region affected by drought. It was observed that SPI and rainfall deviation have positive strong correlations in north-eastern part of the study area. | Spatio-temporal analysis of meteorological drought in cauvery delta zone of Tamil Nadu, India
