ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Clim.
Sec. Climate Adaptation
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fclim.2025.1481926
Assessment of Hydroclimatic Variability and Aridity Trends in the Mississippi River Basin using Parametric and Non-Parametric techniques
Provisionally accepted
- University of Missouri, Columbia, United States
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The Mississippi River Basin (MRB) has experienced substantial hydroclimatic changes driven by climate variability and human activities, emphasizing the need for detailed analyses to support sustainable water resource management and agricultural planning. This study aims to assess spatiotemporal trends in precipitation, potential evapotranspiration (PET), air temperature, and aridity indices across the MRB from 1980 to 2019. Using daily meteorological data from the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS), both parametric (linear regression) and nonparametric (Mann-Kendall and Pettitt's tests) methods were applied to detect trends and change points, ensuring robustness against non-normality and outliers. A 5% significance level was adopted to evaluate statistical significance. Results reveal statistically significant increasing trends in PET (+4.18 mm/year in Arkansas, p < 0.001) and temperature (+0.078°C/year in Ohio-Tennessee, p < 0.001) across most sub-basins, while precipitation trends varied spatially, with significant increases in the Upper Missouri (+1.91 mm/year, p = 0.03) but non-significant declines in the Lower Mississippi (-0.77 mm/year, p = 0.75). Change point analysis identified abrupt shifts in PET and temperature trends in the early 2000s and precipitation shifts in the late 1990s. Aridity analysis, using both the UNEP and De Martonne indices, showed statistically significant increases in aridity in the southern and western MRB (p < 0.05), indicating an expanding risk of drought conditions. These findings demonstrate the intensification of hydroclimatic extremes in the MRB and highlight the need for localized adaptive water management strategies to enhance resilience against future climatic variability.
Keywords: Mississippi River Basin1, Aridity indices2, precipitation3, Potential Evapotranspiration4, Temperature5. 2
Received: 16 Aug 2024; Accepted: 05 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Abeysinghe, Balkissoon and Aloysius. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Umanda Abeysinghe, University of Missouri, Columbia, United States
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