Abstract: To cope with agricultural drought events in the Changjiang River Basin under climate change conditions and improve the ductility of basin irrigation districts for disaster prevention and mitigation, a public weather forecast-based irrigation water demand forecasting method was developed, which was based on the Blaney-Criddle(BC) equation and the water balance equation, and was validated in the Zhanghe Irrigation District in Hubei Province.The results showed that the accuracy of public weather forecasting minimum and maximum temperatures within the forecast period of 7 d reached more than 70%,as well as R all exceeded 0.95.Besides, the average RMSE and MAE,R of the ET0 forecasts during the 7 d forecasting period of the improved BC model were 0.91 mm/d, 0.84 mm/d, and 0.83,respectively, with an overall high level of forecasting accuracy.The irrigation water demand forecasting method can better replicate the typical drought events in Zhanghe Irrigation District in 2022.Therefore, the irrigation water demand forecasting method proposed in this paper is able to meet the requirements of short-term irrigation water demand forecasting accuracy in irrigation areas, and can provide decision support for irrigation areas to cope with drought.