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The Interannual variability of rainfall over homogeneous regions of Indian summer monsoon

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Abstract

The Indian subcontinent, due to its enormous variety of geographical features, is associated with inhomogeneity. Hence, in the present study, we have classified the whole Indian subcontinent into four homogeneous regions, such as North India, Central India, South India, and Northeast India, based on the similarity in rainfall characteristics and associations with the regional/global circulation parameters. These four major homogeneous regions have quite different climatological distribution rainfall as well as the degree of variability, depicting the need of individual exploration of them. The rainfall indices are prepared for an extended period of 120 years from 1901 to 2020 to understand the interannual variability of it over these homogeneous regions. The changes in the temporal trend with time are explored by diving the whole time period into four periods of 30 years each, i.e., 1901–1930 (Period 1), 1931–1960 (Period 2), 1961–1990 (Period 3), and 1991–2020 (Period 4). During period 4, a declining trend is seen over North India while other three regions show an increasing trend. Also, the wavelet analysis is carried out to see the periodicity of rainfall pattern and found that the interannual variability is more during the postindustrial period due to the lack of any dominant periodicity. And, finally, we investigated the teleconnection patterns during these four defined periods for all the homogeneous regions with global sea surface temperature where we get the ENSO monsoon relation is weaker during the recent period for all the regions except north India, explaining the reason behind the drying trend over there.

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Data availability

The datasets used in the present study are freely available: (i) IMD gridded rainfall dataset from http://www.imdpune.gov.in/Clim_Pred_LRF_New/Grided_Data_Download.html (Pai et al. 2015). (ii) The ERSST SST dataset from data https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.ersst.v5.html. (iii) Rainfall indices constructed by Parthasarathy et al. (1994) is obtained from Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune (IITM, Pune; https://tropmet.res.in) website.

Code availability

Scripts and programming used for the analysis in the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and recommendations on ways of improving the manuscript. We are grateful to the Director, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), and Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) for providing the necessary facilities to carry out this study. The authors thank the Pratyush High Power Computing Centre (HPC) staff in IITM, Pune, India, for providing computer resources. We acknowledge all the data sources. MS is thankful to IITM for the research fellowship. The graphical analyses for this study have been done using Python.

Funding

This research is a part of a PhD work of MS carried out at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and did not receive any specific grant from any funding agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ministry of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, India

    Monalisa Sahoo & Ramesh Kumar Yadav

  2. Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India

    Monalisa Sahoo

Authors
  1. Monalisa Sahoo
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  2. Ramesh Kumar Yadav
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Contributions

MS and RKY have conceived the idea of the study. MS has performed the analysis. The initial draft of the manuscript was written by MS and RKY has contributed towards improving the manuscript with his valuable suggestions.

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Correspondence to Monalisa Sahoo.

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Sahoo, M., Kumar Yadav, R. The Interannual variability of rainfall over homogeneous regions of Indian summer monsoon. Theor Appl Climatol 148, 1303–1316 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-03978-w

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