Spatio-temporal Patterns of Indian Monsoon Rainfall

TL;DR

This paper analyzes spatial and temporal rainfall patterns during the Indian monsoon, using a discrete model to identify active and break spells, transition probabilities, and regional rainfall behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a novel discrete spatio-temporal pattern framework for Indian monsoon rainfall analysis, including a seasonal evolution model and regionalization based on rainfall spells.

Findings

Patterns are 'sticky' with high self-transition probabilities.

Identified sequences of rainfall patterns characterize monsoon evolution.

Regionalization of landmass based on simultaneous wet and dry spells.

Abstract

The primary objective of this paper is to analyze a set of canonical spatial patterns that approximate the daily rainfall across the Indian region, as identified in the companion paper 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. Firstly, the ten 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 behavior 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 paper also identifies typical temporal rainfall patterns for individual locations. This enables us to determine wet and dry spells at local and regional scales. Lastly, we specify sets of locations that tend to have such spells simultaneously, and thus come up with a new regionalization of the landmass.