Assessing drought for the period 1955-2021 in Heraklion-Crete (S. Greece) urban environmentAssessing drought for the period 1955-2021 in Heraklion-Crete (S. Greece) urban environment Πλήρης Δημοσίευση σε Συνέδριο Conference Full Paper 2025-02-132022enThe urban environment is characterized by unique climatic characteristics that can highly affect the growth and survival of vegetation. This is critical for cities located in the Mediterranean basin, as it is considered a climate change hot-spot with frequent and long lasting drought episodes. In this work, a drought assessment was performed for the city of Heraklion, by investigating the values of four drought indices (SPI, RDI, aSPI and eRDI) for the period 1955-2022. The results confirm the good performance of all examined indices to detect extreme and severe droughts, however there were differences for the identification of moderate droughts. In 2015-2016 the most severe drought in the city occurred, whereas a significant decreasing trend in the indices values was identified for the dry semester of the year, implying that more frequent and severe droughts are expected to occur in the future, with severe impacts on urban green infrastructures and on the local urban climate dynamics.The climate data used were kindly provided by the Hellenic National Meteorological Service. This work was financially supported by the LIFE17 GIC/GR/000029 GrIn project "Promoting Urban Integration of Green INfrastructure to improve climate governance in cities", which is co-funded by the European Commission under the "Climate Change Action-Climate Change Governance and Information" component of the LIFE Programme and the Hellenic Green Fund.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/464–47110th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Agriculture, Food and EnvironmentCEUR Workshop Proceedings - 10th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Agriculture, Food and Environment Proutsos Nikolaos Solomou Alexandra Bourletsikas Athanassios Chatzipavlis Nikolaos E. Petropoulou Michaela Bourazani Konstantina Μπουραζανη Κωνσταντινα Nikolopoulos Jason N. Georgiadis Christos Kontogianni Aimilia B. CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org) Drought SPI RDI SDI aSPI eRDI Trends Urban environment Greece LIFE GrIn project