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Disparity in rainfall trend and patterns among different regions: analysis of 158 years’ time series of rainfall dataset across India

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Abstract

Rainfall anomaly during crop-growing season can have large impact on the agricultural output of a country, especially like India, where two-thirds of the crop land is rain-fed. In such situation, decreased agricultural production not only challenges food security of the country but directly and immediately hits the livelihood of its farming community. In a vast country like India, rainfall or its anomalies hardly follow a specific pattern, rather it is having high variability in spatial domain. This study focused on the trends of national and regional rainfall anomalies (wetness/dryness) along with their interrelationship using time series data of past 158 years. The significant reducing wetness trend (p < 0.05) over north mountainous India was prominent with an increasing trend over southern peninsular India (p < 0.10). However, long-term annual wetness was increasing over entire peninsular India. The results of change point tests indicate that major abrupt changes occurred between early to mid-twentieth century having regional variations. The regional interrelationship was studied using principal component, hierarchical clustering, and pair-wise difference test, which clearly indicated a significantly different pattern in rainfall anomalies for north east India (p = 0.022), north central India (p = 0.022), and north mountainous India (p = 0.011) from that of the all India. Result of this study affirmed high spatial variability in rainfall anomaly and most importantly established the unalike pattern in trends of regional rainfall vis-à-vis national level, ushering towards paradigm shift in rainfall forecast from country scale to regional scale for pragmatic planning.

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Funding

This work is financially supported under the National Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem (Task force 6), Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICAR Research Complex for NEH Region, Mizoram Centre, Kolasib, Mizoram, 796 081, India

    Saurav Saha & S. B. Singh

  2. ICAR Research Complex for NEH Region, Umiam, Meghalaya, 793 103, India

    Debasish Chakraborty

  3. Division of Statistical Genetics, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi, 110 012, India

    Ranjit Kumar Paul & Sandipan Samanta

Authors
  1. Saurav Saha
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  2. Debasish Chakraborty
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  3. Ranjit Kumar Paul
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  5. S. B. Singh
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Correspondence to Debasish Chakraborty.

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Saha, S., Chakraborty, D., Paul, R.K. et al. Disparity in rainfall trend and patterns among different regions: analysis of 158 years’ time series of rainfall dataset across India. Theor Appl Climatol 134, 381–395 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-017-2280-9

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