<p>Drought is a natural disaster that causes land and water resources to be undesirably affected from climate change-induced reductions in precipitation. Prospective water deficits may have negative effects on social, economic and political aspects of especially arid and semi-arid climate zones. Therefore, spatio-temporal characteristics of previous and future droughts should be analyzed to mitigate or reduce the negative impacts of droughts on land and water resources. In this study, the temporal and spatial characteristics of significant meteorological droughts between 1976 and 2022 in the Kızılırmak Basin, which has a semi-arid climate in Türkiye, were analyzed using the Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI) and the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI). Drought intensity-areal extent-frequency (DIAF) curves were constructed for the basin at different recurrence periods and the spatio-temporal characteristics of chosen historical droughts were investigated in detail. The results show that the selected droughts (1984, 1994, 2001, 2008, 2013, 2017, 2020 and 2022) have a wide range of recurrence periods (from 2 to 100&#xa0;years) and extreme droughts prevail in a significant part of the basin (up to 65%). Both SPI and RDI results revealed a considerable increase in drought duration and severity from 2000 to 2022. According to the findings, it was concluded that RDI and SPI provide useful information about the spatio-temporal characteristics of droughts in the basin.</p>