Initial reports signify some speci c isolated locations in different latitudes, revealing a paradoxical increase in both heavy and very heavy rainfall events and also an increment in total, i.e., in both rainfall and temperature, over ecologically sensitive areas along the Western Ghats (WG). This paper presents a coherent study of the full-scale of daily rainfall and temperature over 27 well-spaced stations in the study area to determine its extent and investigate whether or not this contradictory behaviour is real. Also, an attempt has been made to assess the differential behaviour of rainfall, temperature, and heavy rainfall events in association with land use and land cover change (LULC). The analysis revealed that rainfall and temperature over the study area are increasing, whereas heavy rainfall events have increased during 1981-2020 with strong peaks after 2000 around 18 o -19 o N (Mumbai metropolitan region), 14 o -16 o N (mining and quarrying regions in Goa), and 9 o -12 o N (a narrow strip of land spanning across the coastal towns of Karnataka and Kerala) latitudes. The majority of the rainfall excess years coincided with El-Nino years, indicating that El-Nino does not affect rainfall negatively. However, rainfall over the WG is in uenced by local relief and cascading topography. The spatial pattern of average annual rainfall shows a decreasing trend from south to north because the elevation and span of rainfall occurrence are higher in the southern part of WG. The ndings of the current research will help in building a strategy to address trends and patterns of climatic variables in association with LULC.
IntroductionRainfall and temperature are two different but important parameters of global atmospheric circulation (Solomon et al. 2015;Longobardi and Boulariah 2022).The entire earth shows an increase in temperature between 1880 and 2012. The temperature increase in the last century was about 0.85 o C (ranging from 0.65 to 1.06 o C) (IPCC 2014). Therefore, the recent change in temperature affects the global atmospheric circulation, which in turn results in extreme climatic events like oods and droughts (Prabhakar et al. 2019). Furthermore, rainfall patterns all over the world are disturbed due to the recent rise in temperature (Filho et al. 2022). According to Trenberth et al. (2007), rainfall has decreased over western and southern Africa, the Sahel, the area around the Mediterranean Sea, and southern Asia, and increased over northern Europe, Australia, Asia, and North and South America. Apart from this, recent literary studies by Alpert et al. (2001), Altava-Ortiz et al. (2011), and Longobardi and Boulariah (2022 detected long-term inter-annual precipitation over southern Italy and revealed that precipitation is decreasing in and around the Mediterranean basin. For example, Piervitali et al. (1998) andRomero et al. (1998) reported that precipitation trends from 1951 to 1995 in the central-western Mediterranean basin, Spain, and Italy show an average decrease of about 10-20% in total precipitation, wh...
