A century of precipitation trends in forest lands of the Lower Mississippi River Alluvial Valley

Abstract

Variations in long-term precipitation trends due to climate forcings have been observed in manyparts of the world, exacerbating hydrological uncertainties to predicting droughts, floods, waterresource availability, and ecosystem services. The Lower Mississippi River Alluvial Valley (LMRAV) isan important economic region of the midsouth USA, which is prone to natural disasters from extremeclimate events and is known historically for cyclic flooding events and, within the last 20 years, forgroundwater level declines. However, our knowledge of long-term precipitation trends in this regionis fragmented. Using 100-year historic daily precipitation data from six stations of forest lands alongwith multivariate statistical analysis, we found that there were significant increasing trends (p ≤ 0.05)in annual precipitation near the south coastal area of the LMRAV and only marginally increasing trendsin the northern area. Spatial variation in seasonality was observed at the decadal scale with increasingtrends in fall near the coastal area and in spring around the north area. In addition to becoming wetter,the coastal area also experienced higher precipitation intensity with shorter return period over thepast 100 years. These findings are useful to water resource managers for adapting to changing climateconditions in the LMRAV.

Citation

Ouyang, Ying; Zhang, Jiaen; Feng, Gary; Wan, Yongshan; Leininger, Theodor D. 2020. A century of precipitation trends in forest lands of the Lower Mississippi River Alluvial Valley. Scientific Reports. 10(1): 151-. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-69508-8.