Micro scale level rainfall trend analysis at Madhira, Khammam district of Telangana

Abstract

Rainfall is an important factor for agriculture in India as nearly 60 per cent net arable land lacks irrigation and water availability determines the yield of pulses, rice, wheat and sugarcane. The variation of rainfall was one of the major concerns under present climatic situation challenging the farmers to obtain optimum farm production and maintain employment. Therefore, trend analysis was examined for long-term trends from 1975-2021 for rainfall at micro scale level of Madhira in Telangana state. In this study, average monthly and seasonal rainfall, coefficient of variation (CV) was ranging from 43.91 to 300.56 per cent and 27.44 to 171.87 per cent, respectively. The annual value of kurtosis and skewness were -0.39 and 0.47 which resembles light tailed to normal distribution and positively skewed resembling right to the mean. During monsoon, post monsoon and annual rainfall trends were showing non-significantly deceasing trend while winter and post monsoon showed non-significantly increasing trends but, as per Spearman's Rho (non parametric) tests significant increasing trend for winter season. Overall, the four decades of observations showed that there is alternate increasing and decreasing trend at Madhira for monsoon season. The post-monsoon season four decades showed negative departures and annual rainfall was mostly dominated by monsoon, a similar pattern was observed in it also.

Keywords

• Decadal rainfall
• Madhira
• Monsoon season
• Rainfall
• Skewness
• Trends