Abstract

Author:

Damodar Bagale, Madan Sigdel, Deepak Aryal and Binod Dawadi

Doi: 10.26480/magg.02.2024.95.100

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

This study investigated winter rainfall variability from 107 meteorological stations from 1977 to 2018. The average winter rainfall was observed at 63.97 mm. The yearly contribution of winter rainfall variability was 7.04% in 1989 and 0.68% in 2006. There were diverse winter rainfall dynamics over the western, central, and eastern regions. The intrinsic heavy rainfall patterns observed on high complex mountain ranges in the central and eastern regions are in contrast to the minimum rainfall observed in the low land of the eastern regions. The study identified eight winter large dry years based on standardized anomalies. Among those years, 2006 was the worst drier year which quantifies a significant rainfall deficit of about 50 mm from an average rainfall. Major dry winter episodes frequently evolved whole Nepal as well as in different regions in a couple of decades. The western region had observed a large dry winter episode in the year 1999. Similarly, the central and eastern regions had observed deficit winter anomalies in 2006. There were two successive 2008-2009 and three successive drier episodes from 2016 to 2018 observed in recent decades.