Climatic Variation at Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station, India

Abstract

Long-term (45 years) diversified surface meteorological records from Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS), India, were collected and analysed to study the long-term changes in the overall climatology, climatology pertained to a particular observational time, mean daily climatology in temperature, inter-annual variability in temperature, interannual variability in surface pressure, and rainfall for the main Indian seasons—South West and North East monsoons and inter-annual mean monthly anomaly structure in temperature. Results on various analyses show strong and vivid features contributed by climate change for this South Peninsular Indian Arabian Sea Coastal Station, and this paper may be a first time venture which discusses climate change imparted perturbations in several meteorological parameters in different time domains, like a specific time, daily, monthly, and interannually over a station. Being a coastal rocket launching station, climatic change information is crucial for long-term planning of its facilities as well as for various rocket range operational demands.