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Distributional changes in rainfall and river flow in Sarawak, Malaysia

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Abstract

Climate change may not change the rainfall mean, but the variability and extremes. Therefore, it is required to explore the possible distributional changes of rainfall characteristics over time. The objective of present study is to assess the distributional changes in annual and northeast monsoon rainfall (November-January) and river flow in Sarawak where small changes in rainfall or river flow variability/distribution may have severe implications on ecology and agriculture. A quantile regression-based approach was used to assess the changes of scale and location of empirical probability density function over the period 1980-2014 at 31 observational stations. The results indicate that diverse variation patterns exist at all stations for annual rainfall but mainly increasing quantile trend at the lowers, and higher quantiles for the month of January and December. The significant increase in annual rainfall is found mostly in the north and central-coastal region and monsoon month rainfalls in the interior and north of Sarawak. Trends in river flow data show that changes in rainfall distribution have affected higher quantiles of river flow in monsoon months at some of the basins and therefore more flooding. The study reveals that quantile trend can provide more information of rainfall change which may be useful for climate change mitigation and adaptation planning.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Hydraulic and Hydrology, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malayia, Johor Bahru, Johor,, Malaysia

    Zulfaqar Sa’adi, Shamsuddin Shahid & Tarmizi Ismail

  2. Faculty of Civil Engineering, Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Seoul, Korea

    Eun-Sung Chung

  3. State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, Nanjing, China

    Xiao-Jun Wang

  4. Faculty of Civil Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), 81310, Johor Bahru, Malaysia

    Shamsuddin Shahid

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  1. Zulfaqar Sa’adi
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  2. Shamsuddin Shahid
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  3. Tarmizi Ismail
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  4. Eun-Sung Chung
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  5. Xiao-Jun Wang
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Correspondence to Shamsuddin Shahid.

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Sa’adi, Z., Shahid, S., Ismail, T. et al. Distributional changes in rainfall and river flow in Sarawak, Malaysia. Asia-Pacific J Atmos Sci 53, 489–500 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13143-017-0051-2

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