Abstract
Three extreme cases of seasonal precipitation over 31 contiguous meteorological subdivisions of India were decomposed into orthogonal components using eigenvector technique to examine their spatial and temporal behaviour. The first two eigenvectors combined were found to represent the seasonal precipitation over India to a sufficient high degree of accuracy retaining 90–95 percent of the total variance. These two components show high spatial similarity in all the three cases of the precipitation examined.
The first component is characterized by a coherent variation over the area with large coherent variation over the north-east India, Central India and the west coast of India. The coefficients of the component show annual behaviour with the peak values generally reached during July. This component is representative of the summer monsoon (June–September) mode.
The second component characterizes out of phase variation in precipitation between Central India, adjoining parts of the area, and peninsular India. The coefficients of the component show the semi-annual oscillation. It appears that the role of the second eigenvector might be to represent regionality of the seasonal march of the monsoon rain.
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Prasad, K.D. The spatial and temporal characteristics of the seasonal precipitation over India. PAGEOPH 123, 468–475 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00880745
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00880745