Paper

Climate Change in Bihar, India:A Case Study


Authors:
M. Bhushan; L. B. Roy; R. Kumar
Abstract
The present study focuses on the trend analysis of some parameters of climate change. These include annual mean temperature, rainfall, potential evapotranspiration and reference crop evapotranspiration for the 37 districts of Bihar, which is an eastern state in India. The study focuses on the period 1901-2002. The moving average method was for smoothening the time series curve. In order to detect the trend, MATLAB software was. For this study, in order to test the significance, the widely used Mann-Kendall test was run at a 5% significance level on a time series data. For annual mean temperature, all districts indicate a statistically significant increasing trend, whereas in the case of annual rainfall and a potential evapotranspiration trend, all districts indicate a statistically significant decreasing trend. However, this decreasing trend excludes the Araria and Kisanganj districts where a potential evapotranspiration trend indicates an increasing trend. For annual reference crop evapotranspiration, all districts show a statistically insignificant increasing trend. For the Bihar state as a whole, the annual mean temperature and reference crop evapotranspiration show an increasing trend of 0.0047°C/year and 0.07248 mm/year, respectively. Further rainfall and potential evapotranspiration for the state indicate a decreasing trend of 1.974 mm/year and 0.02672 mm/year, respectively.
Keywords
Climate Change; Statistically Significant Value; Rainfall Deficit; Moving Average; Trend Analysis
StartPage
140
EndPage
146
Doi
10.5963/JWRHE0503008
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