New Month & New Beginning. March temperature in Chennai normally indicates the cusp between winter & summer. We tend to see days getting hotter and the mild winter Chennai sees vanishes by this time paving way for the warm humid mornings Chennai is known for. A month or so back we had put out an analysis on the Winters getting warmer in Chennai. Now its time to understand how the March Temperature in Chennai has evolved over the last few decades.
As has been the case the last time around this time as well we stick to Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) of NOAA National Climatic Data Center, a State-of-the-art 3rd generation reanalysis model, well suited for the satellite area. The reanalysis is done using data obtained using Climate Reanalyzer (https://cci-reanalyzer.org), Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, USA.
Interestingly it appears unlike the winter period March Temperature in Chennai shows a fairly stable trend with the mean temperature showing a marginal increase over the years. This increase could be attributed to the overall trend of warming that earth has been going through and for all practical purposes could be pretty much considered as a stable climatic trend.
The trend shows less 0.5°C increase which is pretty much negligible when one looks at the overall scheme of things. As one can observe from the chart unlike the winter temperatures which showed clear spikes since the turn of the millennium no such visible spikes could be observed as far March Temperature in Chennai goes.
Even the Maximum temperature trend also indicates a marginal change with fairly stable temperature trends except for one spike around the year 2012 when the average max temperature peaked at around 37°C otherwise the average max temperature seem to hover around 35°C.
The minimum temperature trends indicate pretty much similar temperature trend over the last few decades to the contrary the average minimum temperatures for the last few years seem to show lesser than the long term trend line.
Interestingly if one were to compare this with our earlier analysis for winter it is once again the increasing maximum temperatures that is driving the mean temperature up. We look forward to your feedback, suggestions and comments on this series.