Abstract:
Rainfall extremes have adverse impacts on
the society and environment of Sri Lanka. The
objective of this paper is to seek evidence spatiotemporal
trends for rainfall variability on climate
change in Eastern Province of Sri Lanka by analyzing
long-term monthly data of rainfall received during the
four rainy seasons - i.e. the Northeast monsoon, the
first inter-monsoon and the second inter-monsoon
during the period 1980-2010, from meteorological
stations of the Department of Meteorology. Five
stations of Eastern Province have observed either
flooding in rapid sequence in recent years. Some
studies attribute such extreme events to rainfall
variability on climate changed induced by global
warming. However, there is a dearth of climatological
studies addressing the spatio-temporal trends in
rainfall over Sri Lanka in support of such attribution.
Using daily rainfall data collected at the 5 stations from
Eastern Province of the Department of Meteorology, It
interprets rainfall trends using different GIS
techniques, so that the practical implications of rainfall
variability on climate change in recent decades are
clearly identifiable. The study finds that the number of
rainy days has declined at all the rainfall stations except
for the Trincomalee station.
