Extreme weather events and contingency crop planning under changing climatic scenario in tarai region of Uttarakhand
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Date
2022-08
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G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar, District Udham Singh Nagar, Uttarakhand. PIN - 263145
Abstract
The current study entitled “Extreme Weather Events and Contingency Crop Planning under Changing Climatic Scenario in Tarai region of Uttarakhand" was undertaken to analyze and detect trends in rainy days & rainfall and to study occurrence of drought, extreme rainfall events, heat & cold waves, probabilities of dry & wet weeks utilizing Markov chain model in order to to generate a contingency crop plan using daily weather data of Pantnagar from 1981-2021. The long term daily weather data was utilized to compute annual, seasonal, monthly & weekly rainy days & rainfall of tarai region as well as to calculate the heat & cold waves occurrence during the study period.The statistical parameters, drought, extreme events and probabilities of dry & wet week were estimated by Weather Cock software. XLSTAT was used with MS-excel for trend detection through Mann Kendall & Sen’s slope estimation test. The study revealed that the average annual rainfall in tarai region was 1552.31 mm distributed across 57 annual rainy days. Monsoon season accounted for 85% of annual rainfall & 77% of rainy days respectively. August received the maximum rainfall. The major concentration of rainfall was observed from the start of 23rd SMW to 39th MW. The findings disclosed the percentage of drought occurrence for no drought, moderate drought & severe drought in tarai region to be 71%, 29% and 0%, respectively. Monsoon season in contribution 92.89% of the total heavy rainfall events (235 recorded events) in the study period. The high probability of occurrence of moderate drought, heavy rainfall events, heat waves & cold waves in tarai region in an erratic & uncertain weather caused due to climate change confirmed need of a plan to ameliorate the damages caused by such
events. Hence, a contingency crop plan was developed to tackle weather related contingencies in tarai region of Uttarakhand