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Drought is one of the most important natural hazards in Iran. Therefore, drought monitoring has become a point of concern for most of the researchers. In the present study, the changes and trend of drought was surveyed, under the current global climate changes, by non parametric Mann-Kendall statistical test for 42 synoptic stations at different places of Iran. Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was calculated to recognize the drought condition at different time scales (3, 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 months' time series) for analyzing the drought trend in the recent 30 years. The obtained results have indicated a significant negative trend of drought in many parts of Iran, especially the South-East, West and South-West regions of the country. According to the results, although some parts of Iran such as North (around the Caspian Sea) and Northeast show no significant trend but in other parts of country, the severity of drought has increased during the last 30 years.

Evapotranspiration is one of the most important factors in agriculture and the hydrological cycle that can be influenced by global warming and climatic changes. In this study, the trend of reference crop evapotranspiration (ET 0 ) computed by penman Penman-Monteith equation and surveyed in 42 synoptic weather stations during last 3 decades . Nonparametric statistical test, Kendall's rank correlation (or τ test) was used to determine ET 0 trends. Although, downward and upward trends were observed, increasing trends had more frequency. Spatial analysis of results indicated upward trends especially in the boundary parts of the country while, no significant trends were distributed in central parts. In addition, correlation analysis between ET 0 trend and other climatic parameters trend (the trend of mean temperature, mean of minimum temperature, and mean of maximum temperature, mean of relative humidity, mean of wind speed and mean of sunshine duration) showed that wind is the most effective parameter on ET 0 . Iran losses more than 70% of annual precipitation by ET 0 . It is obvious that in this country where there are many limitations for water resources management, increase in ET 0 could lead to more problems.

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