Assessing the changes in climate extremes over Karbi Anglong district of Assam, North-East India
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Assessing the changes in climate extremes over Karbi Anglong district of Assam, North-East India Pritha Datta1
•
Sahana Bose1
Received: 26 July 2019 / Revised: 23 December 2019 / Accepted: 1 January 2020 Korean Spatial Information Society 2020
Abstract The changes in the climate extremes are not only an important indicator of climate change but also their spatio-temporal pattern influences the occurrence of droughts, floods, soil erosion, landslides as well as the livelihoods of the human beings. Therefore the present study tries to investigate recent changes in climate extremes using eight indices developed by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices for the Karbi Anglong district of Assam situated in North-East India. This district has gone through several changes in the land use and land cover which is one of the significant factors for bringing changes in the regional climatic conditions. A non-parametric Mann–Kendall test, Modified Mann–Kendall test and Theil–Sen’s slope estimator are used to analyze the trends and trend magnitudes of the extreme indices of temperature and precipitation. The results show that there is an increase in the frequency of the warm days and nights, along with the presence of long dry spells, increasing extreme precipitation events with high intensity throughout the district for a period of 35 years. These changes in the climate extremes can have severe impacts on the availability of water resources which can affect the agricultural activities and reduce the availability of drinking water facilities for the tribal communities. Keywords Climate change Extreme indices Mann– Kendall test Theil–Sen slope estimator Karbi Anglong district
& Sahana Bose [email protected] 1
Department of Geography, Aryabhatta School of Earth Sciences, Assam University, Diphu Campus, Diphu, Assam, India
1 Introduction Evidence of changes in the climate has already been witnessed across the globe through its regional and seasonal variations. Though the intensity of such changes varies spatially and temporally, but the ultimate cause of such changes is mainly due to the anthropogenic forcing. The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [1] says, from the twentieth century and onwards, anthropogenic external forcing supersede the natural one in bringing variations in the climatic conditions at both global and regional scales. It is now widely accepted that changes in the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) due to the combustion of fossil fuels along with the changes in land use and land cover (LULC) are the main contributors of regional climatic changes. Deforestation can be considered as one of the major attributes of LULC which affects the air temperature and precipitation of a region by changing the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration through reducing the carbon storage in trees (as a result of future CO2 fertilization), decreasing the evapotranspiration level, recycled precipitation (RP) pro
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