Effects of adjustment for non‐climatic discontinuities on determination of temperature trends and variability over Iran

• Published in: International journal of climatology 2014-05, Vol.34 (6), p.2079-2096
• Main Authors: Rahimzadeh, Fatemeh, Nassaji Zavareh, Mojtaba
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: adjustment; Climatology. Bioclimatology. Climate change; Earth, ocean, space; Exact sciences and technology; External geophysics; Geophysics. Techniques, methods, instrumentation and models; homogeneity; Iran; Meteorology; non‐climatic discontinuity; temperature
• ISSN: 0899-8418; 1097-0088
• DOI: 10.1002/joc.3823

ABSTRACT In‐situ observations of surface air temperature at 55 weather stations in Iran are analysed for homogeneity and trends over the period 1960–2010. Among them 32 stations have data available for the whole period. The other 23 stations with shorter records are used only to confirm variability during overlapping periods. Discontinuities in the temperature series relate mostly to relocation and changes of environmental conditions at individual stations. These changes alter the statistical characteristics of temperature, including the mean, variance, and frequency distribution and introduce uncertainties in spatially averaged trends. This article determines new estimates of temperature trends over Iran after the detection of artificial change points and application of homogenization.The regional trend of temperature is estimated using seasonal and annual minimum and maximum temperature from stations that have identical variability across the country. The country may be segmented to 10 such regions in terms of trends and variability of temperature. There is little doubt that temperatures have increased in all regions at nearly equal rates of 0.4–0.5 and 0.2–0.3 (°C/decade) for minimum and maximum temperature, respectively in Iran. The finding in earlier work of a few individual stations with negative trends is found to be due to artificial effects such as relocation.