Date of Graduation

12-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences

Advisor/Mentor

Cheng, Linyin

Committee Member

Brye, Kristofor R.

Second Committee Member

Fernandes, Katia

Abstract

Recent studies have examined hydroclimate precipitation reversals, but because it is a newly defined concept, there is minimal research available on how reversals are changing, and it has not been widely investigated. Precipitation reversal is the rapid switch between wet and dry periods or “precipitation extremes and the opposite” (McKay, 2018), based on precipitation measurements in this case. A single reversal is the immediate transition from a wet to a dry period or from a dry to a wet period. Changes in reversals have not been thoroughly reported and this gap in research creates a risk of unpredictable conditions that will negatively impact human activity. This research will serve to report precipitation reversals and how they may change over the state of Arkansas using observational data from Climate.gov and the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI). Both inter-annual and seasonal and inter-annual precipitation reversal events were examined and compared between past and current periods. For seasonal data, using one standard deviation of the baseline period from 1900 to 1950, there was a total of seven reversals for 1900-1950 and 17 reversals for 1951-2021. For inter-annual calculations, there was an increase for both wet-to-dry and dry-to-wet reversals using deviations of one half, one, one and a half, and two. Both annual and seasonal averages showed an overall increase in precipitation reversals in recent years. Anthropogenic practices are heavily tied to precipitation for agriculture, safety, and recreation purposes, so any changes in amounts will have an effect.

Keywords

precipitation; reversal; climate; weather

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