Abstract
Although a few studies on rainfall spatial and temporal variability in the UAE have been carried out, evidence of the impact of climate change on rainfall trends has not been reported. This study aims at assessing the significance of long-term rainfall trends and temporal variability at Sharjah City, UAE. Annual rainfall and seasonal rainfall extending over a period of 81 years (1934–2014) recorded at Sharjah International Airport have been analyzed. To this end, several parametric and nonparametric statistical measures have been applied following systematic data quality assessment. The analyses revealed that the annual rainfall trend decreased from −3 mm to −9.4 mm per decade over the study periods. The decreasing annual rainfall trend is mainly driven by the significant drop in winter rainfall, particularly during the period from 1977 to 2014. The results also indicate that high probability extreme events have shifted toward low frequency (12.7 years) with significant variations in monthly rainfall patterns and periodicity. The findings of the present study suggest reevaluating the derivation of design rainfall for infrastructure of Sharjah City and urge developing an integrated framework for its water resources planning and risk under climate change impacts scenarios.
Highlights
Recent global changes in climate have resulted in increased variability of the hydrological cycle and weather extremes, creating the need to study subsequent changes in hydroclimatic variables to understand the regional effects of climate change [1, 2]
To fully explore rainfall variations and trends essentially triggered by climate change, the assessment was conducted for the entire period as well as on five grouped data series: the old Sharjah airport, the new Sharjah airport, and three overlapping 31-year data records (i.e., 1934–1964, 1960–1990, and 1984–2014)
The 10-year moving average line is a powerful trend indicator showing that annual rainfalls exhibit high deviations from the annual mean (i.e., 103 mm) and that rainfall variability is visibly marked by periodic intermittence between successive wet years and successive dry years
Summary
Recent global changes in climate have resulted in increased variability of the hydrological cycle and weather extremes, creating the need to study subsequent changes in hydroclimatic variables to understand the regional effects of climate change [1, 2]. International and regional assessment reports on climate change (e.g., [3,4,5,6]) classify the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as one of the most vulnerable regions to be affected by climate change and climate extremes. For most Middle East countries, only little is known about the significance of the trends and variability in hydroclimatic data. Several studies have compared simulated climatic data with observed data to assess climate models uncertainty (e.g., [8,9,10,11]) Their works concluded that existing climate models have difficulties to accurately simulate present extreme climate events and these provide additional uncertainty to predict future changes. The importance of continuously assessing the longterm variability and short-term variability of climatic factors, mainly those connected to the availability of fresh water, using in situ climatic data cannot be overemphasized [9, 12,13,14,15]
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