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The last century presents us that the human influence about environment had materialized not only through pollution, but especially by provoking climatic changes at global level, changes which affect us more or less. An important problem of our days, generated by these climatic changes, is represented by drought and the associated phenomena's aridity and desertification. The changes in Earth's global climate show a trend of increasing average air temperature and causing drastic changes in hydrologic cycle. As a result, the vegetation period is expected to become shorter and an even more irregular distribution of precipitation will occur, both from year to year. Essentially, the periods of semi-drought or even drought conditions are going to become more frequent.

In Romania, the problem of drought was confirmed from many years. More than 2.8 million hectares of agricultural fields presents a tendency of desertification. At the same time, drought affects almost the entire Romanian agricultural fund. Timis County, situated in the western part of Romania, know a transition period, from humidity excess to humidity deficit because of a long period with intensive drainage but also due to the effects of climatic changes. The lack of humidity in soils is more evident in the northwestern part of this county.

This paper presents an analysis of water scarcity and water demands for agricultural areas from western part of Romania using two programs: CropWat 8.0 and Hidroesta. The first program, CROPWAT 8.0, allow the users to calculate crop water requirements and irrigation requirements based on soil, climate and crop data. We can also use this program to develop irrigation schedules for different management conditions. This program can also be used for the calculation of scheme water supply for varying crop patterns and to evaluate farmers' irrigation practices and to estimate crop performance under both rainfed and irrigated conditions.

HidroEsta is a tool that facilitates and simplifies the laborious calculations, in this case being mainly used for determining the evapotranspiration calculations (through different methods as Thorthwaite, Blaney-Criddle, Penman, Hargreaves) and water balance calculations.

This paper will focus especially on extreme western part of Timis County, the area around Sannicolaul Mare City and which covers the Aranca plain and will try to present an analysis of water scarcity phenomenons (by analyzing evapotranspiration, water balance variation, different other indicators) and water demands for agricultural areas.