Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
11
Exploring Trends in Climatological
Time Series of Orissa, India Using
Nonparametric Trend Tests
11.1 Introduction
Scientific literature and successive assessment reports of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2001; IPCC, 2007; Min et al., 2011) show
that the net anthropogenic radiative forcing causes the global warming and
intensification of hydrological cycle with consequent increase in the occurrence
of extreme weather events. To trace the future of water resources under climate
change, climate research uses simulation models well known as general
circulation models (GCMs) for forecasting (Koutsoyiannis and Montanari,
2007). Trend analysis of paleoclimatic observation has been an important tool
to test the presence of a systematic component (i.e., signal) against the
background of natural variability and randomness (i.e. noise) of the instrumental
record of hydroclimatic time series (e.g., Zhang et al., 2001; Bhutiyani et al.,
2007; Wilson et al., 2010). Huntington (2006) reported that trends in hydrologic
variables are consistent with an intensification of the water cycle. However,
substantial uncertainty in trends exists due to regional differences of response
variables and unavailability of datasets.
Frequent extreme weather events of recent years are increasingly more
pronounced in the Indian sub-continent due to large dependence of the
population (~68% of above one billion population) on the climate-sensitive
agriculture and allied sectors (O'Brien et al., 2004; De et al., 2005). For
example, the impact of the deficit of 19% in the Indian summer monsoon
rainfall in 2002 is estimated to be of billions of dollars i.e. well over 1% of the
gross domestic production (Gadgil et al., 2004). Using both GCMs and regional
Invited contribution by
Dileep K. Panda and A. Kumar - Directorate of Water
Management (ICAR), Chandrasekharpur, Bhubaneswar - 751 023, Orissa, India.
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