Abstract
Recently, climate change makes itself felt at increasing levels due to
rising temperatures, irregular precipitation patterns and changing
weather events. Although the frequently used Mann-Kendall (MK) method
has disadvantages such as needing serial independence, it helps to
detect monotonic trends to investigate climate change effects on a given
time series. Climate change may have different features on different
levels such as the lows and highs of a given time series, leading to
non-monotonic trends. Innovative trend analysis (ITA) as an innovative
trend analysis method detects non-monotonic trends, which MK cannot. In
this study, MK method is improved to detect non-monotonic trends
(non-monotonic MK) and applied for Murat River basin, a branch of
Euphrates River, precipitation series at Bingöl, Muş, and Ağrı
meteorological stations. Although classical MK method cannot detect any
trend on the river basin, non-monotonic MK (NMK) method detects two
important decreasing (increasing) trends on the low (high) values of
Bingöl and Muş (Bingöl) stations. Also, stationarity analysis is applied
through the statistical significance level concept for the river basin
precipitation series using the NMK method. Bingöl station has a
non-stationary precipitation series with a value of 3.07 and 95%
confidence level, while Muş station has a remarkable value of 1.58, Ağrı
station conserves its stationarity characteristic on the precipitation
series. It is hoped that the newly developed NMK method will help to
understand the effects of climate change on hydro-meteorological
historical records and predict future events for more efficient
hydraulic structure designs.