Spatio-temporal Trend Detection of Rainfall for Climate Change Assessment in Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar District of Gujarat State, India

Abstract

The present research aims to assess the historical change in rainfall patterns with the changing climate in the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar district in the state of Gujarat in India. The Mann-Kendall (MK) test along with Sen’s slope estimator have been used for detecting the trend of rainfall data series. The trend of annual rainfall is carried out for – (1) six rain gauge stations established by the State Water Data Center (SWDC) and (2) 11 grid data available from the National Center for Environmental Prediction-Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (NCEP-CFSR) for 35 years starting from 1979 to 2013. Results obtained from these two data sets for the trend detection were found consistent. Furthermore, the analyses of annual and monthly rainfall using MK test and Sen’s slope estimator at six rain gauge stations are carried out in three time periods i.e. 1974-1987, 1988-2001 and 2002-2016. The inverse distance weighted (IDW) method of interpolation is used for the results obtained from the spatial distribution of the temporal rainfall trend for interpolating the station value over the study area. Annual rainfall for data length of 1979 to 2013 shows an increasing trend. The trend of annual and monthly rainfall for July and September shows a positive trend for the span 2002-2016. This study would be useful to the water resource department and policymakers for climate change adaptation in the study area.