Abstract:
The Upper Blue Nile region in Ethiopia, frequently affected by drought conditions and much of its water flows from high
land regions to territorial countries. Hence to characterize, monitor and forecast drought, an advanced drought index which
considers the combination of different climatic conditions in this region is required. The main objective of this article is to
develop new drought indices by considering with and without climate signal contribution which is precious in decision mak
ing of policy makers and scientific community. In order to estimate the quality and performance of the developed indices we
implemented statistical methods of RMSE, MAE and bias with the existing index of SPI across different time scales. Infact
we developed two drought indices by considering SST into the meteorological variables (MVDIstS) and without considering
SST (MVDIst0). Both drought indices show drought severity, larger duration than that of SPI.
