Recent changes in Indian monsoon in light of regionalization based on various rain features

Abstract

The effect of climate change on precipitation pattern is emerging out as a serious global challenge. However, the quantification and assessment of the climate change effect on precipitation are a challenging issue given the spatio-temporal inhomogeneity of rainfall. Previous studies mostly used only rain intensity information for the identification of climate change signature by selecting homogeneous rain regions. Rain climatology, however, has several other important characteristics like occurrence of multiple rain type, occurrence of extreme rain events and their spatial distribution. The present study provides a novel approach to combine satellite data with ground measurements for addressing this issue. In this study, the Indian subcontinent has been divided into homogeneous regions based on six different rain features, obtained from ground observations and TRMM satellite measurements of 12 years, using K-medoid clustering technique. The rain features showed distinguishable patterns in the resulting nine homogeneous rain zones and distinct behavioural patterns in the inter-relationships between the various rain features. To verify the consistency of the proposed regionalization, the recent changes in mean monsoon rain rates are then studied using 40 years of rain gauge measurements for these regions. Increasing trends in monsoon rain are observed in two homogeneous regions whereas five of them have shown decreasing signature of rain intensity. Although the present study focused only on monsoon rain over India, the results indicate the suitability of the proposed method as an efficient technique of identifying homogeneous region for other seasons and locations as well. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature.