Regional non-stationary future extreme rainfall under changing climate over Asian Monsoon Region

Abstract

An increase in the Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) of rainfall extremes questions the assumption of stationarity in the design and planning of water infrastructures under changing climate. To address this, non-stationary-based approaches are widely used for assessing the extremes over time. However, the trends associated with future extreme rainfall would differ from that of the historical dataset. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to develop a non-stationary modelling approach to generate future regional IDF curves by incorporating the trend in the rainfall over Asian Monsoon Region (AMR). Daily rainfall data from (i) APHRODITE and (ii) baseline period (1951–2005) and future projections (2020−2100) simulated from 27 GCMs are used in this study. The proposed framework includes (i) selection of GCM models, (ii) Stationary (S) and Non-Stationary (NS) Generalized Extreme Value Distribution (GEVD) Models, (iii) delineation of extreme precipitation zones, (iv) performance evaluation of zone-wise models, and (v) estimation of future regional IDF curves for near-future (2020–2060), and far-future (2061–2100). Results show that the eight models and their corresponding GCM covariates cover around 90% of grids across the AMR compared to S-GEVD models among the 27 GCMs. Six extreme precipitation zones were obtained, and fitted regional models could mimic the individual station models. The change in extreme rainfall intensity for the future climate is higher for zone-1 (low extreme rainfall region), with an increase of 87–98% across different emission scenarios using the non-stationary models, whereas for zone-6 (higher extreme rainfall region) has a 60–68% increase from its stationary counterparts. For high and low emission scenarios, intensity increases up to 98% and 87% respectively for a lower return period (5-year), and 65% and 58% for a higher return period (100-year) by the end of the century.