Time series analysis of climatic variability and trends in Shiwalik to Pir Panjal mountain range in the Indian western Himalaya.

The Himalaya represents the most fragile ecosystem in the world, signifying its sensitivity towards global climate change. In the current scenario, the Himalaya needs to assess the climatic change trends at the regional level. To investigate climatic trends, we analysed the long-term (1980–2020) climatic data (maximum temperature—T_Max and minimum temperature—T_Min, precipitation, and relative humidity—RH) collected by the five different meteorological stations from Shiwalik to Pir Panjal mountain range of Jammu province. The nonparametric Mann–Kendall test was used to analyse the significance of climatic change trends for temperature, precipitation, and RH data on seasonal and annual scales, whereas the nonparametric Sen's estimator of the slope was applied to quantify the magnitude of climatic change trends. The results reveal that the Jammu province region received 53% of annual precipitation from Western Disturbances and 47% from Indian Summer Monsoon. The contribution of Western Disturbances was greater towards the northern region of Jammu Province, while the southern lower region was substantially influenced by ISM. With substantial inter-station variations, our results indicated a significant increasing trend of T_Max only for Banihal, while all the studied stations except Jammu exhibited a significant increasing trend of T_Min. For the entire Jammu province, a significant increasing trend of T_Max was observed for the spring season. On an annual scale, the increasing rate of changes was observed more for T_Min (0.066 °C) than T_Max (0.016 °C) of Jammu province while a nonsignificant declining rate of change was exhibited for precipitation (− 0.098 mm a⁻¹). The shifting pattern in temperature and precipitation could have serious environmental implications that will greatly influence the biodiversity and ecological stability of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]