Research Article Meteorological Drought Index Mapping in Bangladesh Using Standardized Precipitation Index during 1981–2010 Md. Anarul Haque Mondol, 1 Iffat Ara, 1,2 and Subash Chandra Das 1 1 Department of Geography and Environment, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka 1342, Bangladesh 2 School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia Correspondence should be addressed to Md. Anarul Haque Mondol; anarulju@gmail.com Received 25 August 2016; Revised 31 December 2016; Accepted 18 January 2017; Published 20 March 2017 Academic Editor: Roberto Fraile Copyright © 2017 Md. Anarul Haque Mondol et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Natural disasters are a major concern in Bangladesh, particularly drought which is one of the most common disaster in Bangladesh. Drought needs to be explained spatially to understand its spatiotemporal variations in diferent areas. In this paper, the meteoro- logical drought has been shown by using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) method and illustrated through the Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) method across Bangladesh. We used rainfall data of 30 meteorological stations in Bangladesh during the study period of 1981–2010. Te results indicate that drought has been fuctuating and it has become a recurrent phenomenon during the study period. Te SPI depicted the drought conditions that plunged dramatically in 1981, 1982, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1994, and 1996 and then gradually improved in 2004, 2006, and 2009 in the country. Te present study demonstrated that drought occurred in Bangladesh on an average of 2.5 years. Drought was more prominent in the northern, south-western, and eastern regions in Bangladesh compared to the rest of the areas of the country. Te outcomes of the present study will help in during disaster management strategies, particularly drought, by initiating efective plans and adaptation remedies in diferent areas of Bangladesh. 1. Introduction Globally many countries have become vulnerable to drought due to climate change and other natural conditions [1]. Drought is one of the key natural disaster in Bangladesh [2]. It has become a major concern in the country, particularly in terms of Bangladesh agricultural production and environ- mental damage. It adversely impacts agricultural production and natural environment [3], mostly areas in the north- western part [4, 5]. Mapping drought is necessary to under- stand the regional severity of drought to manage it efectively and to reduce the agricultural production losses and protect the environment. Drought is mainly agricultural, meteorological, hydrolog- ical, and social. Meteorological drought is defned on the basis of the degree of dryness and the severity of drought in a region [6]. Meteorological drought was assessed through annual rainfall [7]. For instance, annual rainfall between 25% and 50% defciency was considered as moderate drought whereas annual rainfall less than the value of 50% defciency was considered as severe drought in a region. Moreover, a year was considered as a drought year when the total area of the country was afected individually with more than 20% defciency of annual rainfall [8]. Bangladesh has experienced drought frequently over the past years [9, 10]. Despite the recurrent and devastating nature of drought in diferent areas of Bangladesh, it has received far less attention compared to food [11]. However, drought should be assessed importantly [12] to understand its mag- nitude [13] in diferent areas [14] from the past meteorolog- ical records [1, 15]. Meteorological information, particularly regional rainfall evidence [16], is the common way of drought diagnosis by using GIS technique [17, 18]. Spatially explicit drought conditions may ofer valuable concerns through this technique [19, 20], which needs to be applied in case of Bangladesh drought assessment. Several studies have been carried out on droughts and related issues in Bangladesh [21, 22]. Most of the researches in Bangladesh are mainly on agri- cultural drought and region-based [23]. For instance, a study conducted by Alam et al. [23, 24] showed the spatial extent of Hindawi Advances in Meteorology Volume 2017, Article ID 4642060, 17 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/4642060