Assessment of Trends and Variability of Rainfall and Temperature for the District of Mandi in Himachal Pradesh, India

Climate variability, particularly, that of the annual air temperature and precipitation, has received a great deal of attention worldwide. The magnitude of the variability of the factors changes according to the locations. The present study focuses on detecting the trends and variability in the annual temperature and rainfall for the district of Mandi in Himachal Pradesh, India. This study used annual and monsoon time series data for the time period 1981-2010 and modified the Mann-Kendall test and Sen's slope estimator in analyzing the problem. The results of the analysis indicate that the annual maximum temperature (TMX) and annual minimum temperature (TMN) for the period of 30 years have shown an increasing trend, whereas the monsoon’s maximum and minimum temperatures have shown a decreasing trend, although it is statistically not significant. The amount of annual rainfall does not show any significant trend, but the monsoonal rainfall has shown an increasing trend that is also statistically not significant. The resulting Mann-Kendall test statistic (Z) and Sen’s slope estimate (Q) of all the parameters studied indicate that changes are occurring in the magnitude and timing of the precipitation and temperature events at the Mandi station.