Long-term precipitation and temperature historical records (monthly recorded for 44 years) in three stations (Boutilimit (station 1), Nouakchott (station 2), and Rosso (station 3)) are employed to investigate the drought characteristics and to investigate the temperature and precipitation trends during the period of 1970 to 2013 in Trarza region in Mauritania. Six Drought Indices (DIs), namely normal Standardized Precipitation Index (normal-SPI), log normal Standardized Precipitation Index (log-SPI), Standardized Precipitation Index using Gamma distribution (Gamma-SPI), Percent of Normal (PN), the China-Z index (CZI), and Deciles are used for the drought analysis. These methods are based on 1-, 3-, 6-, and 12 month time periods. The results showed that the log-SPI, the gamma-SPI, PN and Deciles were able to capture the historical extreme and severe droughts observed in early 1970s and early 1980s. In the trend analysis, The Mann Kendall (MK test), Spearman’s rho (SR test), Şen trend test were used for the trend identification in the time series and the Pettitt test for detecting the change point at the time series while the Thiel-sen Approach was used to estimate the magnitude of the slope in the precipitation and temperature time series. The results of trend analysis showed that the average temperature and the annual precipitation are both increasing by about 0.3oC per decade and 3 mm per year, respectively. Keywords: Drought, Trend, Trarza Region, Mauritania, SPI, CZI, PN, Deciles, Arid, Precipitation, Temperature