Spatial distribution of secular trends in annual and seasonal precipitation over Pakistan

Abstract

CR Climate Research Contact the journal Facebook Twitter RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsSpecials CR 74:95-107 (2017) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/cr01489 Spatial distribution of secular trends in annual and seasonal precipitation over Pakistan Kamal Ahmed1,*, Shamsuddin Shahid2, Eun-Sung Chung3, Tarmizi Ismail2, Xiao-Jun Wang4,5 1Faculty of Water Resource Management, Lasbela University of Agriculture, Water and Marine Sciences, Balochistan, Pakistan 2Faculty of Civil Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), 81310 Johor Bahru, Malaysia 3Department of Civil Engineering, Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Seoul 139-743, South Korea 4State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, Nanjing 210029, China 5Research Center for Climate Change, Ministry of Water Resources, Nanjing 210029, China *Corresponding author: kamal_brc@hotmail.com ABSTRACT: The presence of autocorrelation and long-term persistence (LTP) can lead to considerable change in the significance of trends in hydro-climatic time series. This therefore casts doubt on past findings of climatic trend studies that did not consider LTP. We assessed the trends in spatiotemporal patterns of annual and seasonal precipitation of Pakistan in recent years (1961-2010) using precipitation data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) using (1) the ordinary Mann-Kendall (MK) test and (2) the modified Mann-Kendall (MMK) test, which can discriminate LTP from unidirectional trends. The results indicate that significance in trends obtained using the MK test is reduced when LTP is taken into consideration. The annual precipitation in Pakistan is increasing in the northern highlands and a few places in the sub-Himalayan ranges in northeast Pakistan, where monsoon precipitation is also increasing. There is no indication of significant change in winter precipitation. Post-monsoon precipitation is increasing at a few locations in the monsoon-dominated southeast region and decreasing in the southwestern arid region. KEY WORDS: Long-term persistence · Precipitation trend analysis · Modified Mann-Kendall · GPCC data · Pakistan Full text in pdf format NextCite this article as: Ahmed K, Shahid S, Chung ES, Ismail T, Wang XJ (2017) Spatial distribution of secular trends in annual and seasonal precipitation over Pakistan. Clim Res 74:95-107. https://doi.org/10.3354/cr01489 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in CR Vol. 74, No. 2. Online publication date: December 27, 2017 Print ISSN: 0936-577X; Online ISSN: 1616-1572 Copyright © 2017 Inter-Research.