Climate change over India as revealed by critical extreme temperature analysis

Abstract

Extreme weather events such as high and low temperatures, heavy rainfall etc. claim thousands of lives and cause extensive damage to natural and regional economy. According to a report of the Bureau of Canada (Ungar 1999) there were no natural disasters before 1987 which caused insured losses of more than US $ 1 billion. During the past decade there have been 18 such disasters. The finding supports the fact that the impacts of these extreme events in terms of economic losses are increasing.
 The paper presents a study of critical extreme maximum/minimum temperature days for 103 well distributed stations over the country for a data period of 30 years from 1971-2000. The trends are studied separately for stations south of 20° N, north of 20° N, coastal stations and NE Indian stations by using least square method and the significance is tested using t-statistic. The results are presented.