Drought assessments based on gridded precipitation products may reproduce broad temporal variability while differing in the identification of local drought-prone locations. This study evaluates multiscale hydroclimatic drought across 73 Iranian synoptic stations during 1981–2024 by comparing station observations with a coarse-resolution CPC precipitation product and raw and bias-corrected CHIRPS. Precipitation validation was performed before drought analysis. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was calculated at 1-, 3-, 6-, and 12-month accumulation scales, and cross-product agreement was evaluated separately for drought chronology, station-level drought frequency, and hotspot classification. Nonlinear temporal characteristics and lagged teleconnection associations were examined as complementary explanatory analyses rather than as components of the hotspot definition. The results show that agreement among products depends strongly on the quantity being evaluated. At SPI-12, the products retained meaningful agreement in drought chronology, but agreement in station-level drought ranking was negligible, indicating that similar regional temporal behavior does not necessarily preserve the spatial ordering of drought recurrence. Product choice also produced substantial station-specific uncertainty, with an average SPI-12 drought-frequency range of approximately 4.18 percentage points. A consensus classification identified 12 of the 73 stations (16.4%) as robust hotspots supported by station observations and at least one gridded product, whereas the remaining stations were classified as product-sensitive, uncertainty-sensitive, or lacking hotspot consensus. Nonlinear metrics characterized temporal organization but did not distinguish hotspot classes consistently. Lagged associations with large-scale climate modes remained detectable after accounting for serial dependence and multiple testing, although they were interpreted as statistical associations rather than causal controls.