Evaluation of geostatistical and determinist methods for mapping the aridity in eastern Algeria
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35208/ert.1629345Keywords:
De Martonne aridity index, Krigeage, IDW, geostatistical and deterministic methods, climate changeAbstract
The use of climate indices in climate studies and climate-related planning has proven to be very important for climate mapping. The aim of this particular study is to use the De Martonne aridity index to map the climate of eastern Algeria and to determine the most appropriate spatial interpolation method, namely ordinary, universal, simple kriging and inverse distance weighting, to delineate the climatic zones of the region based on temperature and precipitation data from the NASA Power/Data Access Viewer site over a period of 41 years (1981, 1-2021). The root mean square error (RMSE) was used to select the optimal interpolation method. Our results show that ordinary kriging has been identified as the best method for predicting drought with an RMSE of 0.031 compared to simple kriging (RMSE = 0.641), universal kriging (RMSE = 0.576), and inverse distance weighting (RMSE = 0.513). Moreover, ordinary kriging demonstrated superior performance, as evidenced by its strong correlation with measured and estimated data (R = 0.89).
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