Trends and changes detection in rainfall

Abstract
This study assessed the extreme rainfall and temperature changes over Mono river basin by the end of 21st century under the highest greenhouse gas emission scenario RCP8.5. Simulations of eight regional climate models (RCMs) provided by Africa-CORDEX program were considered. The maximum and minimum temperatures and rainfall were analyzed. Two groups of indices were analyzed. The first group consists of frequency indices: maximum number of consecutive dry days and wet days. The second group is intensity indices: five day maximum rainfall and simple daily intensity index. These variables were calculated at annual and seasonal scales. Changes from the baseline period 1971–2000 were computed for far future 2071–2100. As result, almost all the RCMs considered predicted a decrease of the rainfall and increase of maximum and minimum temperatures over most parts of the Mono basin, particularly in the south. Declining mean monthly precipitation and irregular rainy seasons at all scales were exhibited by most of the models. Simple daily intensity and five-day maximum rainfall are projected to decrease by the majority of the used models. As for dry and wet sequences, the RCMs showed an increase of the consecutive dry days and a decrease of wet days.
Description
A global view of climate change impacts is important to quantify the aggregated effects in a given region since large scale processes can influence driving forces at sub regional or mesoscale. Indeed, the detection of the planetary warming trend, attributed to anthropogenic activities, have been presented with greater certainty in the 4th report of the IPCC. According to this report, the average global temperature will increase and could reach 4.5 ◦C by 2100, the precipitation will change and the extreme events will be increasingly recurring. Several studies (Aguilar et al., 2013; IPCC, 2013; Masson et al., 1999) showed that impacts of climate extremes are mostly depending on the spatial scale considered and vary from a region to another, from country to country and even from one local area to another within the same country.
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