Abstract
Drought forecasting is important in preparing for drought and its mitigation plan. This study focuses on the investigating the performance of Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and Empirical Wavelet Transform-Gaussian Process Regression (EWT-GPR) in forecasting drought using Standard Precipitation Index (SPI). Daily rainfall data from Gua Musang, Kelantan from 1975 to 2008 was used in this study. SPI data of 3, 6, 9, and 12 months were then calculated using the rainfall data. EWT was employed to decompose the time series into several finite modes. EWT was used to create Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) which are used to create ARIMA models. The objective of this study is to compare the effectiveness of the proposed method against GPR model in the accuracy of forecasting drought in Arau, Malaysia. It was found that the proposed model performed better compared to GPR model in all SPI studied.