Climate Change Impacts on Rainfall Distribution at Teluk Intan Catchment

Abstract

Many studies have been conducted on determining the effect of climate change on the precipitation. The increasing of temperature has led to increase of evaporation rate, rainfall intensity, sea water level and so forth. These changes will lead to greater disaster such as increase of flood magnitude, flood event, drought intensity and prolong the drought period. The main objective of this study is to analyze the monthly rainfall pattern from 1984 to 1993 for the Teluk Intan Basin. Five stations of rainfall data were retrieved from DID. The rainfall distribution pattern was calculated by using two types of probability distributions known as Log-Pearson type-III and Gumbel using California’s method. Later, Chi-square test of goodness of fit was applied to validate the results. Based on the calculated results, out of the five stations used in this study, only three stations shows are fitted to apply the mentioned method which is Mengkuang River St, Labu Kubong St and Telok Intan station. Maximum total rainfall for ten years period occurs at Pt. IV Sg. Manik St as the value is 5570.5 mm, meanwhile minimum total rainfall occurs at Pt. I Sg. Manik St as the value is 1462.5 mm. For the average temperature, year 1990 gives the maximum value that is 29.18°C, while year 1986 gives the minimum value that is 28.79°C. The chi-square test was performed to determine which method is fitted to use as statistical analyses. Lastly, correlation test was tested to determine the correlation between rainfall and temperature. Based on the correlation result, it clearly shows a weak correlation between rainfall and temperature. For Telok Intan St the correlation value is 0.17, Pt. I Sg. Manik St is 0.28, Mengkuang River St is 0.17, Pt. IV Sg. Manik St is 0.4, and lastly Labu Kubong St gives the smallest correlation value that is 0.07. As a conclusion, the distributions of rainfall pattern in this area are not really affected by the temperature. However, the temperature distribution still will affect the rainfall distribution in a longer period.