Exploring temporal patterns of rainfall: a time series assessment of variability, trends, in the Kashmir Himalayan ecosystem

Climate change has raised concern throughout the globe, and the discussion has entered the political arena despite being a hot topic in research. Although affecting the whole world, the Himalayas, due to their fragile ecology and geographical location, are most prone to any minute modification in the climate. This study investigated climate change in the Jhelum River basin region of the Kashmir Himalayas by studying the variability and trend of precipitation patterns and critical climate change variables. This study analyzes the spatiotemporal changes in rainfall using multi-station observational data from 1975 to 2023 at annual, monthly, and seasonal timescales. The Mann–Kendall and Sen slope innovative tests were employed to analyze the significant rainfall trends. The Pettitt, Standard Homogeneity, Buishand range, and Von Neumann's ratio tests were used to detect the abrupt change point for a particular era. Top of Form"Missing values in the rainfall dataset were effectively interpolated by employing both Decision Tree and K-Nearest Neighbors techniques, enhancing the robustness and completeness of the data analysis. The ArcGIS platform was used to map rainfall trend patterns in the Jhelum River basin using geostatistical approaches such as inverse distance weighting, spline interpolation, trend analysis, and kriging. The observational data reveals varying trends in precipitation, with stations Phalgam, Kupwara, Qazigund, Gulmarg, and Kokernag demonstrating significant negative (-ve) trends in annual rainfall depth at the 0.05 significance level. These findings are further corroborated by Sen's slope values of −1.979, −6.744, −5.174, −11.058, and −1.637, respectively. In contrast, Srinagar station exhibited a significant positive (+ ve) trend in the annual rainfall. As the primary urban center of Kashmir, located within the Jhelum River basin, the rising rainfall trends in Srinagar are significant for urban planning and flood management.