Chaos and trend analysis of monthly precipitation over Arabian Peninsula and Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

Arabian Peninsula (AP) and Eastern Mediterranean (EM) are two of the hottest regions in the world; and their temperature increased enormously in the last century. In addition, water scarcity has been one of the vital issues from the beginning of civilization in these lands. Hence, plant, animal species, and human life in this domain have been in really big danger. Moreover, serious economic and socio-political conflicts in the societies and struggles between countries are expected to emerge in near future. Monthly precipitation observation data set of CRU with a 0.5° × 0.5° resolution is used to investigate the nonlinear dynamics of precipitation over AP and EM. Reconstruction of phase space technique is applied to find delay times and embedding dimensions. The delay time changes between 2 and 10 months and embedding dimension alters between 10 and 26. The maximum Lyapunov exponents are also calculated to find the possibility of chaos in each grid points. Apart from the northern Turkey, one can claim strong possibility of chaos over the study regions. The originality of this research stems from the fact that it is the first time where the aforementioned variables are analyzed spatially in the region. In addition, trend analysis of precipitation is also studied in three different periods (1901–1951, 1952–2002, and 1901–2002) over AP and EM. According to findings, the precipitation tends to increase over most of the region in the first period, but it started to decrease in the second period.