International Journal of
Water Resources and Environmental Engineering

  • Abbreviation: Int. J. Water Res. Environ. Eng.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 2141-6613
  • DOI: 10.5897/IJWREE
  • Start Year: 2009
  • Published Articles: 345

Article in Press

Analysis of Rainfall Trend in the eastern parts of Ethiopia, West Harargae

Fitsum Yimenu

  •  Received: 01 June 2018
  •  Accepted: 29 December 2018
Analysis of rainfall trend is an important tool for decision making in water resources management. The objective of this study was to investigate the time series trend of rainfall data for three sites in the eastern parts of Ethiopia, west Harargae. The double mass curve techniques was used to assess the homogeneity of the rainfall data and the Man-Kendall test was employed to detect the changes. Accordingly, the analysis showed that there were no significant change in the annual rainfall data for Hirna and Asebe-Tefri while Meis had significant trend changes in the annual data. Furthermore, the Sequential mann-kendall test has shown some interesting results for the study sites. Inspecting the plot U(t) and U’(t) for Hirna revealed that there has been a decreasing trend in the annual rainfall record. There has been continuous abrupt changes during 1994, 1996,1998, 2000 but the two statics(U(t) and U’(t) ) started to clearly diverge from 20002 indicating probable climate change. Likewise, the test statistics exhibited that there has been a decreasing trend in annual rainfall record both for Asebe Teferi and Meiso. The abrupt changes in the record occurred in 1991, 1997, 1999 and 2001 at Asebe Teferi while the years; 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2003 showed abrupt changes. Moreover, a clear abrupt change was observed in 2008 and 2004 at Asebe Teferei and Meiso respectively, as the two functions started to diverge in those years.