Impact of monsoon teleconnections on regional rainfall and vegetation dynamics in Haryana, India.

ABSTRACT

Our study has investigated the impact of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on spatio-temporal dynamics of Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) as well as vegetation for a period of 1980 to 2019 at regional scale in Haryana, India. The gridded rainfall datasets of India Meteorological Department (IMD) were examined on monthly and seasonal scale using various statistical methods like mean climatology, coefficient of variation, slope of linear, Sen's slope, Mann-Kendall Z statistic, and hierarchical cluster analysis. The influence of ENSO on spatial distribution of ISMR was observed, where we found increasing and decreasing rainfall patterns during La Niña and El Niño years, respectively. We attempted to establish a link between ISMR and various teleconnections using time series of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Physical Sciences Laboratory, and statistically significant and positive correlation was observed with the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), whereas significantly negative correlations were observed with SST of Niño 3, Niño 3.4, and Niño 4 regions. The gridded datasets of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) atmospheric reanalysis V5 (ERA5) were used to evaluate the influence of ENSO on atmospheric dynamics using lower and upper tropospheric wind circulation (850 hPa and200 hpa), vertically integrated moisture transport (VIMT), and surface moisture flux (SMF). We have used satellite-based normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) datasets of the Global Inventory Monitoring and Modeling System (GIMMS) to investigate the impact of ENSO on vegetation dynamics of Haryana and found that NDVI values were higher and lower in case of La Niña and El Niño years, respectively.