Assessment of climate variability and meteorological drought on an annual scale on the Algerian coast from 1985 to 2022

This study aims to assess climate trends and meteorological drought on an annual scale in 17 weather stations distributed along the Algerian coast, which extends over 1200 km, for the period 1985-2022, based on four climatic variables: minimum, maximum, and monthly mean temperatures, as well as annual precipitation totals. The results show that, in the majority of stations in the study area, precipitation is not very aggressive, with a predominance of the "Low" class for erosivity, and moderate in its concentration. Climate trends indicate a significant increase in precipitation of about 18.26% since the early 2000s, while most stations have not shown any significant trend or break in temperatures. Although the SPI and SPEI indices show a strong positive Spearman correlation, ranging from 0.797 to 0.968, the SPEI is more sensitive to climatic variations and better suited to assessing drought conditions aggravated by high temperatures. The drought characterization shows that 62.38% of years are classified as near normal, while wet and dry conditions account for 18.27% and 19.35% of years, respectively. The year 1994 has the greatest percentage of moderately dry conditions, while the year 2000 shows the highest percentage of very dry and extremely dry conditions. The decades are ranked in ascending order of favorable wet conditions as follows: 2005-2014, 2015-2022, 1995-2004, and 1985-1994. In addition, the most severe drought peaks were detected in 1989, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2020 and 2022.