Spatio-temporal patterns of daily Indian summer monsoon rainfall. Issue 1 (11th February 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mitra, Adway; Apte, Amit; Govindarajan, Rama; Vasan, Vishal; Vadlamani, Sreekar
• Is Part Of: Dynamics and statistics of the climate system. Volume 3:Issue 1(2018)
• Publication Date: 2019-02-11
• Subjects: Indian summer monsoon rainfall -- Markov random field -- Graphical models -- Spatio-temporal patterns; Climatology -- Periodicals; Climatology -- Statistical methods -- Periodicals; Climatology -- Mathematical models -- Periodicals; 551.6
• DOI: 10.1093/climsys/dzy010
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2059-6987

Abstract

Abstract: The primary objective of this article is to analyse a set of canonical spatial patterns that approximate the daily rainfall across the Indian region, as identified in the companion article where we developed a discrete representation of the Indian summer monsoon rainfall using state variables with spatio-temporal coherence maintained using a Markov random field prior. In particular, we use these spatio-temporal patterns to study the variation of rainfall during the monsoon season. First, the 10 patterns are divided into three families of patterns distinguished by their total rainfall amount and geographic spread. These families are then used to establish 'active' and 'break' spells of the Indian monsoon at the all-India level. Subsequently, we characterize the behaviour of these patterns in time by estimating probabilities of transition from one pattern to another across days in a season. Patterns tend to be 'sticky': the self-transition is the most common. We also identify most commonly occurring sequences of patterns. This leads to a simple seasonal evolution model for the summer monsoon rainfall. The discrete representation introduced in the companion article also identifies typical temporal rainfall patterns for individual locations. This enables us to determine wet and dry spells at local and regional scales. Last, we specify sets of locations that tend to have such spells simultaneously and thus come up with a new regionalization of the landmass.