Trends in Daily Temperature and Precipitation Extremes over Dire-Dawa, 1980-2018

Gezahegn Bekele Tashebo

doi:10.7176/jees/11-9-03

Abstract

Extreme climate events have profound impacts on economies and livelihoods of many regions of the world. In Ethiopia, for example the major floods such as in Dire-dawa and Omo basin of June 2006 illustrates the risks to ecosystems, human health and welfare, and infrastructure from short duration weather extremes. There is a paucity of information on trends in climate extremes in the country. However, a joint World Meteorological Commission for Climatology/World Climate Research Programme (WCPRP) project on climate Variability and Predictability (WMO CCl/CLIVAR) Expert Team (ET) on Climate Change Detection, Monitoring and Indices have defined 27 core climate indices mainly focusing on extreme events which can be derived through the use of RClim-Dex Software. In this study, therefore, the RClim-Dex software has been used to derive climate extreme indices for Dire-Dawa station in the Eastern Ethiopia region based on climate data for the period 1980 to 2018. The objective was to examine changes in climate extremes over the city for water provision and urban planning such as flood management practice. These indices have shown insignificant decreasing trends in annual rainfall, Consecutive maximum 5 days precipitation and R95p, R95p% precipitation. A Significant warming pattern was evident in both the maximum and minimum temperature indices. In general the results of this study are in a general agreement with what we have been observed with people’s perception about extreme weather events in the last 39 years. Keywords: RClimDex, Climate Change, extremes Weather, trends and people perception DOI: 10.7176/JEES/11-9-03 Publication date: September 30 th 2021

Highlights

Climate change and especially extreme climatic events in recent years have been increasingly expressed as described by Solomon et al (2007), these events can greatly affect the nature and the living world, and the consequences will be felt in the economic, environmental and social spheres
The Report of the Working Group on Climate Change Detection and Related Rapporteurs recommends that extreme climate indices need to be used for the detection and monitoring of extreme climatic events (Peterson et al, 2001)
Severity of the Change in Vulnerability As we have indicated the above question most of the respondents said that they had observed climate change in the last-30 years

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Climate change and especially extreme climatic events in recent years have been increasingly expressed as described by Solomon et al (2007), these events can greatly affect the nature and the living world, and the consequences will be felt in the economic, environmental and social spheres. STUDY AREAS AND DATA COLLECTION In this study, Dire-Dawa city in Ethiopia were selected for analyzing the extreme climate indices. Because it is the most vulnerable city by extreme climate events like drought, flash flood high and temperature. It is located in the eastern part of the country enclosed by the state of Somalia and the state of Oromia. The quality control performs the following steps: Replaces all missing values (currently coded as -99.9) into an internal format that the software recognizes (i.e. NA, not available), and Replaces all unreasonable values into NA Those values include: a) daily precipitation amounts less than zero, and; b) daily maximum temperature less than daily minimum temperature.

RESULT

Not significant prcptot

Increase Decrease No Change

Findings

CONCLUSIONS