Assessment of climate change impact on temperature and rainfall trend in the Setifian High Plains of Algeria

Within the scope of the global climate change, monitoring and assessment of meteorological parameters gain growing importance. Hence, the analysis of long-term climate series having either increasing or decreasing trend, makes relevance to the weather patterns, and often provides further prediction of extreme meteorological events in the near future. In this perspective, this research purposes to investigate and interpret temperature and rainfall trends as well as the effect of climate change in three main districts from the Setifian High Plains region, namely, Setif, Ain Oulmene, and Boutaleb. Meteorological data were extracted from the TerraClimate dataset available at the Google Earth Engine platform over a 42-year-long period (from 1980 to 2021). Mann-Kendall, Spearman’s rho, and Şen’s trend tests were used to assess the trend, while Pettitt’s test was applied to detect the change point in time series data. The Theil-Sen approach was used to estimate the slope magnitude in the series. Results showed significant increasing trends in the minimum, maximum, and average temperatures over time for all the three stations. The magnitude of the upward trend in temperature data was found to be at the rate of 0.023 to 0.03 °C per year for all stations. Pettitt’s test found the year 1998 as a change point both for the maximum and average annual temperatures for all stations, while the year 2013 was detected as a change point in the minimum temperature for Ain Oulmene and Boutaleb stations. However, rainfall showed non-significant decreasing trends at 5% significance level for all stations. This study concludes that there is an increase in climate variability over the sampling period, which reveal the necessity of adopting the suitable adaptation strategies for facing the impact of climate change.