Assessment of precipitation in Syria, trend analysis, during the period of (1955-2006)‎

Abstract EN

With respect to precipitation trends, there is no doubt that any persistent change in precipitation pattern or in the characteristics of the precipitation (intensity, frequency and duration), would have significant consequences for the environment.

Thus global warming studies pay special attention to the crucial climate variable.

There are, however, difficulties in identifying climate change signals in precipitation.

Some of these difficulties are related to the quality of the data, errors in measuring precipitation, the length of the precipitation data highlights another difficulty in tracking the climate change signals, since precipitation is temporally, as well as spatially distributed, a highly variable parameter.

Sometime it is possible to detect a trend in a short time series of precipitation, which, in reality, could be a part of long- term variability.

Therefore, care has to be taken when interpreting the trend analysis of precipitation data.

To estimate the climate change and to observe trends in precipitation, precipitation records for the period of 1955-2006 were used to identify climatic trends and to determine to what extent these trends are potentially attributable to global warming.

Although recent changes in atmospheric variability are associated with broad precipitation climate change, the Mann-Kendall trend test was applied to examine seasonal and annual precipitation data.

Significant positive and negative trends at the 90 and 95% significance levels were detected.

Furthermore, like most of the Regional researches, significant trends in precipitation occur most commonly during autumn, where seven of the twelve stations exhibit significant increases of 2 - 15 %/decade and Annual of 4 % /decade.

The significant decreases in winter precipitation were 5-7 %/decade and in spring of 9-12 % /decade.