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Spatio-temporal trends of rainfall across Indian river basins

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Abstract

Daily gridded high-resolution rainfall data of India Meteorological Department at 0.25° spatial resolution (1901–2015) was analyzed to detect the trend in seasonal, annual, and maximum cumulative rainfall for 1, 2, 3, and 5 days. The present study was carried out for 85 river basins of India during 1901–2015 and pre- and post-urbanization era, i.e., 1901–1970 and 1971–2015, respectively. Mann–Kendall (α = 0.05) and Theil–Sen’s tests were employed for detecting the trend and percentage of change over the period of time, respectively. Daily extreme rainfall events, above 95 and 99 percentile threshold, were also analyzed to detect any trend in their magnitude and number of occurrences. The upward trend was found for the majority of the sub-basins for 1-, 2-, 3-, and 5-day maximum cumulative rainfall during the post-urbanization era. The magnitude of extreme threshold events is also found to be increasing in the majority of the river basins during the post-urbanization era. A 30-year moving window analysis further revealed a widespread upward trend in a number of extreme threshold rainfall events possibly due to urbanization and climatic factors. Overall trends studied against intra-basin trend across Ganga basin reveal the mixed pattern of trends due to inherent spatial heterogeneity of rainfall, therefore, highlighting the importance of scale for such studies.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by Information Technology Research Academy (ITRA), Government of India under ITRA-Water Grant ITRA/15(69)/WATER/M2M/01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural and Food Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

    Deepak Singh Bisht, Chandranath Chatterjee & Narendra Singh Raghuwanshi

  2. Department of Biological Systems Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, USA

    Venkataramana Sridhar

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  1. Deepak Singh Bisht
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  2. Chandranath Chatterjee
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  3. Narendra Singh Raghuwanshi
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  4. Venkataramana Sridhar
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Correspondence to Deepak Singh Bisht.

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Bisht, D.S., Chatterjee, C., Raghuwanshi, N.S. et al. Spatio-temporal trends of rainfall across Indian river basins. Theor Appl Climatol 132, 419–436 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-017-2095-8

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