Trend analysis for drought event in peninsular Malaysia

Abstract

In this paper, the geostatistics application is employed for analysis of drought events in verifying the upward or increasing and downward or decreasing trend during the drought occurrence. About 33 years of daily precipitation data obtained from 69 stations during the period of November, 1975 to October, 2008 in Peninsular Malaysia are analyzed to characterize the trend of dry events. The amount of precipitation is classified based on the standardized precipitation index (SPI) to determine the drought periods and proceed with the Mann-Kendall test for trend identification. These results are further verified by applying the kriging method. The kriging results describe that the trend values for drought events in Peninsular Malaysia interprets an upward trend especially in eastern and western parts. © Penerbit UTM Press, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.