Climate Trends in Wayanad: Voices from the Community
Danesh Kumar and Pavan Srinath, "Climate Trends in Wayanad: Voices from the Community", Presented at the UGC Sponsored National Seminar on ‘Recent Trends in Climate & Impact of Climate Change on South-West India’ at the St. Joseph’s College, Devagiri, Kozhikode, Kerala (2011)
[Fulltext PDF] [Download Rainfall Data set]
March 2012. We are happy to release the daily rainfall dataset from Wayanad for free and public use, as a part of an Open Data Initiative, at Public Affairs Centre. The dataset is available under the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0.
Abstract: Climate change is a complex phenomenon that has numerous and wide-ranging impacts on the environment and livelihoods. While a host of global trends in climate and impacts thereof have been elucidated, locally-relevant analyses are far fewer in number and remain poorer in quality. Wayanad is a high-altitude valley in Northern Kerala that is cut off from much of its surroundings by mountain ranges and enjoys a unique local climate. In order to better understand the local climate and trends therein, community and traditional knowledge systems were utilized to understand their perceptions of, and experiences with climate. Wayanad, like much of rural India, has a majority of its livelihoods directly dependent on climate and are highly vulnerable to climate variability, with climatic changes having profound direct and indirect impacts. In this paper, the traditional classification of weather, climate and seasonality are explored and their correspondence with meteorological data sets is analysed. The paper demonstrates the constructive integration of traditional knowledge with data and modern scientific understanding, where the former knowledge is able to contextualise trends in data and provide basis for causal linkages. Major climate trends observed in Wayanad include a weakening in the early phase of the south-west monsoon precipitation; increasing polarisation of daily rainfall and more frequent heavy rainfall days; and hastened maturation of a variety of crops.
Keywords: Climate; Climate Change; Wayanad; Highland; Rainfall; Agriculture; Traditional Knowledge; Kerala; India; Traditional Calendar; Extreme rainfall; Monsoon;