Assessment of high rainfall events and drought over Kerala for planning agricultural operations

The daily rainfall data from agrometeorological observatory installed at six different agricultural research stations viz., Ambalawayal, Pilicode, Pattambi, Vellanikkara, Kumarakom and Vellayani in Kerala for the period 1983 to 2018 were used to study the extreme weather events like high rainfall events, agricultural droughts and meteorological droughts. Agricultural drought, meteorological drought and high rainfall events were assessed using Weathercock v 3.1, a software developed at Central Research Institute for Dry Land Agriculture (CRIDA), Hyderabad (Saikia et al., 2017) was used to analyze climatic data for characterizing crop growing environments. According to India Meteorological Department, meteorological droughts have been categorized two types based on rainfall deficit from normal value.