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“Extreme weather events have severe consequences for human society. The impacts of the changing climate will likely be perceived most strongly through changes in intensity and frequency of climate extremes. Studies have found that human activities have contributed Selleckchem Ceritinib to an increase in concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases contributing to intensification of heavy rainfall events (Min et al., 2011). In the context of hydrology, the changing climate will likely accelerate the hydrological cycle on a global scale, and subsequently intensify the uneven spatial and temporal distribution of hydrological

resources (Huntington, 2006 and Trenberth, 1999). The intensity of extreme rainfall events is projected to increase under global warming in many parts of the world, even in the regions where mean rainfall decreases (e.g., Semenov and Bengtsson, 2002 and Wilby and Wigley, 2002). Thus climate adaptation strategies for e.g. emergency planning, design of engineering structures, reservoir management, pollution control, or risk calculations rely on knowledge of the frequency of these extreme events (Kumke, 2001). Assessment of these extreme rainfall events is important in hydrological this website risk analysis and design of urban infrastructures.

The increasing trend of rainfall extremes has quantifiable impacts on intensity duration frequency relations (Kao and Ganguly, 2011), and an increase in the intensity and/or frequency of extreme rainfall events eltoprazine may result in the flooding of urban areas (Ashley et al., 2005 and Mailhot et al., 2007). In India, rainfall variability is a central driver of the national economy as it is predominantly agricultural. A change in extreme events would have a large impact on the growing economy of India as most of the population live in urban areas. Several studies have

addressed the issue of trends in rainfall in India since last century. Long-term southwest monsoon/annual rainfall trends over India as a whole were previously studied by Parthasarathy et al. (1993) and Rana et al. (2012), among others. Long term trends for the last 50 years indicate a significant decrease in the frequency of moderate-to-heavy rainfall events over most parts of India e.g., Dash et al. (2009) and Naidu et al. (1999). This is corroborated by a significant rise in the frequency and duration of monsoon breaks over India during recent decades (Ramesh Kumar et al., 2009 and Turner and Hannachi, 2010), while the frequency of extreme rainfall events (100 mm/day) have increased in certain parts of the country (Goswami et al., 2006). Future climate studies for India based on climate model simulations suggest that greenhouse driven global warming is likely to intensify the monsoon rainfall over a broad region encompassing South Asia (e.g., Lal et al., 2000, May, 2002, May, 2004, May, 2011, Meehl and Arblaster, 2003 and Rupakumar et al., 2006).