Due to economic, social, and environmental perplexities associated with drought, it is considered as one of the most complex natural hazards. To investigate the beginning along with analyzing the direct impacts of drought; the significance of drought monitoring must be highlighted. Regarding drought management and its consequences alleviation, drought forecasting must be taken into account (11). The current research employed multi-layer perceptron (MLP), adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system

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... FIS), radial basis function (RBF) and general regression neural network (GRNN). It is interesting to note that, there has not been any record of applying GRNN in drought forecasting. Materials and Methods: Throughout this paper, Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) was the basis of drought forecasting. To do so, the precipitation data of Gonbad Kavous station during the period of 1972-73 to 2006-07 were used. To provide short-term, mid-term, and long-term drought analysis; SPI for 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, and 24 months was evaluated. SPI evaluation benefited from four statistical distributions, namely, Gamma, Normal, Log-normal, and Weibull along with Kolmogrov-Smirnov (K-S) test. Later, to compare the capabilities of four utilized neural networks for drought forecasting; MLP, ANFIS, RBF, and GRNN were applied. MLP as a multi-layer network, which has a sigmoid activation function in hidden layer plus linear function in output layer, can be considered as a powerful regressive tool. ANFIS besides adaptive neuro networks, employed fuzzy logic. RBF, the foundation of radial basis networks, is a three-layer network with Gaussian function in its hidden layer, and a linear function in the output layer. GRNN is another type of RBF which is used for radial basis regressive problems. The performance criteria of the research were as follows: Correlation (R2), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Results Discussion: According to statistical distribution analysis, the optimal precipitation distribution in many c [...]