Analysis of long-term trends of rainfall and extreme rainfall events over Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep Islands of India

Abstract

The two major archipelagos of India, the Andaman & Nicobar Islands and the Lakshadweep situated in the climate-hazardous areas of the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea respectively are largely affected by weather systems developing over the sea and heavy rainfall activities. The recent two daily gridded rainfall data sets published by IMD; Rajeevan et al. (2010) at 1° × 1° spatial resolution and Pai et al. (2014) at 0.25° × 0.25° spatial resolution extending for a period of more than 100 years have been extensively used by researchers to study the rainfall characteristics at various spatiotemporal scales over the Indian mainland. However, these data sets do not include the grids over these two island meteorological subdivisions of India mainly because of the absence of daily rainfall observation for this long period. In this study, an attempt has been made to develop daily gridded rainfall data over these island subdivisions for the recent 70 years (1951 to 2020) in two spatial resolutions, viz., 1° × 1° and 0.25° × 0.25° using all the available islands station data during the period and carry out statistical analyses of various rainfall characteristics over these islands. The 0.25° × 0.25° data set was observed to be more comparable with the official rainfall time series of IMD for both these two Island subdivisions, and hence this data set has been used to carry out the trend analysis of Daily events of rainfall DER (> = 5 mm) for these two island subdivisions for the whole data period of 1951-2020 and the climate regime shift period of 1971-2020. DER was classified into two categories DMR (5-100 mm), daily moderate rainfall events and DHR (100 mm and above) daily heavy rainfall events. Signs and magnitude of the long-term trends in the frequency of DER (with DMR & DHR) showed significant changes during the recent period 1971-2020.