Identification of Homogeneous Zones in Kerala Through K-Means Clustering

Abstract

Rainfall is a major source of water to flora and fauna. The variations in rainfall greatly affect agriculture and the daily life of human beings. Surface temperature is another factor that influences and brings changes in the climatic conditions, which in turn affects the environment as a whole. Over the past few years, the global mean surface temperature follows a steady increasing trend, while the trend of Kerala monsoon and post monsoon rainfall remains unpredictable. These variables has been analyzed and studied to determine the changes and future threats. The temperature and monsoon rainfall data has been extracted for a total of 58 grid points all over Kerala for the years 1951 to 2019 (69 years). k- means clustering method is applied to form clusters or groups with similar traits. Clustering assisted to regionalize Kerala State into places of homogeneous characteristics with respect to rainfall, temperature and its combinations. The optimal cluster number is obtained by Elbow’s method, which is found to be 4. The cluster divisions is 10-22-8-18 for rainfall and 9-16-18-15 for temperature. The cluster results for the combination of rainfall and temperature concluded to be same as that of rainfall alone, implying the greater importance of rainfall in delineating the zones.