Abstract:
Nowadays, tourism is affected by the knowledge of a region’s climatic characteristics. Therefore,
it is crucial to identify the potential regions and appropriate time for attracting tourists in relation with climatic comfort. Due to having climatic diversity and water resources such as rivers, waterfalls, caves and hot springs, Khorassan Razavi province is one of the potential regions for tourism attraction in IRAN. This study attempts to assess human comfort or discomfort for recreational and water sport activities according to Equivalent Effective Temperature (EET) index using meteorological data from Khorassan Razavi synoptic station for 1990-2011. Furthermore, the climatic comfort zoning map for tourism in the province were made by ArcGIS and Geographic Information System (GIS) potentials by inverse distance weighting (IDW) interpolation method. The results showed that October, June, September, April, May, August and July have the best comfort conditions for recreational activities and water sports, respectively. Also Nishabur and Chenaran cities with 4 and Mashhad with 1 month had the longest and the shortest monthly periods for using water resorts, respectively. Similarly, in this research, available appropriate tourism areas are introduced according to EET index for different months in order to achieve higher understanding of the province’s potentials.
Machine summary:
"Considering climatic conditions as the most important environmental factor that is affecting tourism activities (Perry, 1993; Boniface & Cooper, 1994; Zoulfaghary, 1999; De Freitas, 2003; Ebrahimi, 2004; Mohammadi & Saidi, 2008; Ranjbar et al.
Other researchers have made much efforts to develop indices for determining comfortable weather conditions in order to determine appropriate climatic conditions for tourism (Mieczkowski, 1985; Perry, 1993; Becker, 2000; Hamilton, 2002; Lise & Tol, 2002; Johnstone, 2007; Matzarakis &Alcoforado, 2007).
Abusiani (2010) determined human comfort for recreational activities and water sports in Northern Khorassan province according to EET index, the results indicated that for most regions of this province, the months of July and August have adequate conditions in order to use water resources, rivers and lakes for recreational activities and water sports, thus Jajarm and Sisab have highest and lowest number of adequate days to use water resorts, respectively.
This study will evaluate climatic comfort conditions for recreational activities and water sports in Khorassan-razavi province in IRAN according to meteorological data (1990- 2010) and using EET index.
With calculating areas for different regions of EET distribution in different months (Table 2), we can conclude (رجوع شود به تصویر صفحه) Fig. 9: EET distribution in the month of November and the appropriate places for tourism that between months of April, May, June, July, August, September and October which have comfortable climatic conditions, months of October and July have the highest and lowest areas of normal tourist attractions, respectively."