Abstract
Understanding spatiotemporal patterns and trends of Indian Summer
Monsoon extremes have always been an important task mostly because the
impacts of extreme events have an enormous effect on agriculture,
economy, life and eco-system. In general, findings from the exploration
of extreme events with limited data will have high uncertainty, and it
is important to investigate the trends with a high long-term dataset for
improved understanding of extreme events. Further, the patterns and
interactions become further unusual, unexpected and unpredictable,
coupled with the existing challenges of global warming-induced climate
change. Hence, the study was primarily prompted by these realizations
and an implied aspiration to quantify spatiotemporal patterns and trends
of Indian Summer Monsoon extremes. In the present study, Extreme
rainfall is defined in three categories, namely severe (99th
percentile), very high (95th percentile) and high (90th percentile)
during the monsoon season in each year. The temporal changes in extreme
rainfall have been detected over the period 1901–2019 using
non-parametric Mann-Kendall and Sen’s slope estimator tests,
respectively. The analysis revealed significantly intensifying rainfall
magnitudes in Jammu and Kashmir, parts of Gujarat, Rajasthan and
Peninsular India. The outcomes indicate that the magnitudes of extreme
rainfall are likely to increase in future in these regions. On the
contrary, Central and some regions of North-eastern India shows
deceasing trends in the extreme rainfall significantly. Consistency of
the trends, both temporally and spatially has been explored considering
three time windows with an overlap of 10 years. The findings of the
temporal evolution of extreme rainfall reveal spatiotemporal pattern is
not consistent in different periods of the study. The results of the
present study will provide an improved understanding of spatiotemporal
patterns of the daily rainfall extremes during the Indian summer
monsoon.