Validation of the model was carried
out with reference to precipitation series observed in 22 stations
located in the Upper Blue Nile River Basin (UBNRB),
Ethiopia. To the best of our knowledge, the issue on forecasting
of meteorological drought using Hidden Markov Model so
far has not been addressed. Some of the other studies about
using of Markov chain models to predict the transition from
a class of severity to another are listed in [18–20]. The
approach presented herein provides not only a stochastic
methodology to forecast the transition probability from a
drought class to another but also the magnitude and duration
of drought event. It is hoped that the proposed approach and
our findings obtained in this study are useful for further
research in the area of drought forecasting.