Temporal Trends in Estimates of Reference Evapotranspiration over India
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 14, Issue 5
Abstract
Evapotranspiration (ET) is likely to be greatly affected by global warming because of the dependence of ET on surface temperature. The increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is expected to increase precipitation and evaporation proportionally. However, a few studies have shown a decreasing trend for evaporation over the last globally. In India, earlier works showed that there was a significant increasing temporal trend in surface temperature and a decreasing trend in grass reference ET (ETo). To study the temporal trend of ETo along with its regionwise spatial variation, (1971–2002) monthly meteorological data were collected for 133 selected stations evenly distributed over different agro-ecological regions (AERs) of India. ETo was estimated by the globally accepted Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Penman Monteith (PM) method (FAO-56 PM). These ETo values were then analyzed by a nonparametric Mann–Kendall (MK) test (with modified effective sample size approach for serially correlated data) and Sen slope to determine the existence and magnitude of any statistically significant trend over the time period considered in this study. The same analysis was also performed on governing meteorological variables to identify the cause of existence of such trend in ETo. A significant decreasing trend was found in ETo all over India during the study period, which was mainly caused by a significant increase in the relative humidity and a consistent significant decrease in the wind speed throughout the country. However, a general increase in rainfall was not found in recent years.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Allen, R. G. (1995). “Evaluation of procedures for estimating mean monthly solar radiation from air temperature.” Rep., Food and Agric. Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome.
Allen, R. G. (1997). “Self-calibrating method for estimating solar radiation from air temperature.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 2(2), 56–67.
Allen, R. G., Pereira, L. S., Raes, D., and Smith, M. (1998). “Crop evapotranspiration—Guidelines for computing crop water requirements.” Irrig. and Drain. Paper 56, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome.
Allen, R. G., Smith, M., Perriel, A., and Pereira, L. S. (1994). “An update for the definition of reference evapotranspiration.” ICID Bull., 43(2), 1–34.
Annandale, J. G., Jovanovic, N. Z., Benadé, N., and Allen, R. G. (2002). “Software for missing data error analysis of Penman-Monteith reference evapotranspiration.” Irrig. Sci., 21, 57–67.
Bandyopadhyay, A., Bhadra, A., Raghuwanshi, N. S., and Singh, R. (2008). “Estimation of monthly solar radiation from measured air temperature extremes.” Agric. Forest Meteorol., 148(11), 1707–1718.
Bristow, K. L., and Campbell, G. S. (1984). “On the relationship between incoming solar radiation and daily maximum and minimum temperature.” Agric. Forest Meteorol., 31, 159–166.
Chattopadhyay, N., and Hulme, M. (1997). “Evaporation and potential evapotranspiration in India under conditions of recent and future climate change.” Agric. Forest Meteorol., 87, 55–73.
Chiew, F. H. S., Kamaladassa, N. N., Malano, H. M., and McMahon, T. A. (1995). “Penman-Monteith, FAO-24 reference crop evapotranspiration and class-A pan data in Australia.” Agric. Water Manage., 28, 9–21.
Gaffen, D. J., and Ross, R. J. (1999). “Climatology and trends of U.S. surface humidity and temperature.” J. Clim., 12(3), 811–828.
Gifford, R. M., Farquhar, G. D., Nicholls, N., and Roderick, M. L. (2005). “Workshop summary.” Pan evaporation: An example of the detection and attribution of trends in climate variables, R. M. Gifford, ed., Proc. Workshop, Australian Academy of Science National Committee for Earth System Science, Shine Dome, Canberra, Australia, 4–19.
Goyal, R. K. (2004). “Sensitivity of evapotranspiration to global warming: A case study of arid zone of Rajasthan (India).” Agric. Water Manage., 69, 1–11.
Hargreaves, G. H. (1994). “Simplified coefficients for estimating monthly solar radiation in North America and Europe.” Dept. Paper, Dept. Biology and Irrigation Engineering, Utah State Univ., Logan, Utah.
Hargreaves, G. H., and Samani, Z. A. (1982). “Estimating potential evapotranspiration.” J. Irrig. and Drain. Div., 108(3), 225–230.
Hingane, L. S., Rupakumar, K., and Ramamurthy, Bh. V. (1985). “Long-term trends of surface air temperature in India.” J. Climatol., 5, 521–528.
Hirsch, R. M., Slack, J. R., and Smith, R. A. (1982). “Techniques of trend analysis for monthly water quality data.” Water Resour. Res., 18(1), 107–121.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (1995). “IPCC second assessment-climate change.” 1995 Rep., Geneva, Switzerland.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (1996). Climate change 1995: The science of climate change, J. T. Houghton, L. G. Meira Filho, B. A. Callander, N. Harris, A. Kattenberg, and K. Maskell, eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (2001). Climate change 2001: The scientific basis, J. T. Houghton, Y. Ding, D. J. Griggs, M. Noguer, P. J. van der Linden, and D. Xiaosu, eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.
Itenfisu, D., Elliot, R. L., Allen, R. G., and Walter, I. A. (2000). “Comparison of reference evapotranspiration calculations across a range of climates.” Proc., 4th National Irrigation Symp., Am. Soc. Agric. Engrs. (ASAE), St. Joseph, Mich.
Kendall, M. G. (1975). Rank correlation methods, Charles Griffin, London.
Mall, R. K., Gupta, A., Singh, R., Singh, R. S., and Rathore, L. S. (2006). “Water resources and climate change: An Indian perspective.” Curr. Sci., 90(12), 1610–1625.
Mann, H. B. (1945). “Non-parametric test against trend.” Econometrica, 13, 245–259.
Matalas, N. C., and Langbein, W. B. (1962). “Information content of the mean.” J. Geophys. Res., 67(9), 3441–3448.
National Academy of Science (NAS). (1979). Carbon dioxide and climate: A scientific assessment, National Academic Press, Washington, D.C.
Pant, G. B., Rupakumar, K., and Borgaonkar, H. P. (1999). “Climate and its long-term variability over the western Himalaya during the past two centuries.” The himalayan enviroment, S. K. Dash, and J. Bahadur, eds., New Age International (P) Ltd., New Delhi, India, 172–184.
Penman, J. (1980). “An experimental determination of ventilation rate in occupied rooms using atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.” Build. Environ., 15, 45–47.
Peterson, T. C., Golubev, V. S., and Groisman, P. Y. (1995). “Evaporation losing its strength.” Nature (London), 377, 687–688.
Rind, D., and Lebedeff, S. (1984). “Potential climatic impacts of increasing atmospheric with emphasis on water availability and hydrology in the United States.” Rep. EPA No. 230-04-006, 96. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C.
Roderick, M. L., and Farquhar, G. D. (2002). “The cause of decreased pan evaporation over the past .” Science, 298, 1410–1411.
Rupakumar, K., Krishnakumar, K., and Pant, G. B. (1994). “Diurnal asymmetry of surface air temperature trends over India.” Geophys. Res. Lett., 15, 677–680.
Salas, J. D., Delleur, J. W., Yevjevich, V., and Lane, W. L. (1980). Applied modelling of hydrologic time series, Water Resour., Littleton, Colo.
Samani, Z. (2000). “Estimating solar radiation and evapotranspiration using minimum climatological data.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 126(4), 265–267.
Sehgal, J. L., Mondal, D. K., Mondal, C., and Vadivelu, S. (1990). “Agro-ecological regions of India.” Tech. Bull., NBSS Pub. 24, National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning (NBSS&LUP), Indian Council of Agric. Res. (ICAR), Nagpur, India.
Sen, P. K. (1968). “Estimates of the regression coefficient based on Kendall’s tau.” J. Am. Stat. Assoc., 63, 1379–1389.
Singh, N., and Sontakke, N. A. (2002). “On climatic fluctuations and environmental changes of the Indo-Gangetic plains, India.” Clim. Change, 52, 287–313.
Srivastava, H. N., Dewan, B. N., Dikshit, S. K., Rao, G. S. P., Singh, S. S., and Rao, K. R. (1992). “Decadal trends in climate over India.” Mausam, 43, 7–20.
Tebakari, T., Yoshitani, J., and Suvanpimol, C. (2005). “Time-space trend analysis in pan evaporation over kingdom of Thailand.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 10(3), 205–215.
Xu, C.-Y., Gong, L., Jiang, T., Chen, D., and Singh, V. P. (2006). “Analysis of spatial distribution and temporal trend of reference evapotranspiration and pan evaporation in Changjiang (Yangtze River) catchment.” J. Hydrol., 327(1–2), 81–93.
Yue, S., and Wang, C. Y. (2002). “Applicability of prewhitening to eliminate the influence of serial correlation on the Mann-Kendall test.” Water Resour. Res., 38(6), 4–1-7.
Yue, S., and Wang, C. Y. (2004). “The Mann-Kendall test modified by effective sample size to detect trend in serially correlated hydrological series.” Water Resour. Manage., 18(3), 201–218.
Zhang, X., and Zwiers, F. W. (2004). “Comment on Applicability of prewhitening to eliminate the influence of serial correlation on the Mann-Kendall test by Sheng Yue and Chun Yuan Wang.” Water Resour. Res., 40, W03805.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 14 • Issue 5 • May 2009
Pages: 508 - 515
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Nov 7, 2007
Accepted: Jul 6, 2008
Published online: Feb 18, 2009
Published in print: May 2009
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.