DOI: 10.36347/sjavs.2016.v03i02.015

Pages: 160-166

Rainfall is one of the climatic factors influencing a lot in the country's developmental activities as being a natural and freely available resource in all over the world. Sri Lanka is being blessed with the tropical nature where the benefits through the agricultural sectors are higher than the ordinary. On the other hand, drought is one of the identified disasters among the other natural disasters which cause the tremendous decrease in the production performance of the country and livelihood activities of the human being as well. Therefore, the concern on the agricultural activities via the freely available resources especially depending on the rainfall pattern should be focused a lot. With those concerns, present study was conducted by selecting one of the major dry zones (Mannar District) in Sri Lanka. For the documentary supports, statistical records were collected from the Meteorological Department (Colombo and Mannar District) for the period of 1980 to 2010 (30years records). Rainfall data, mean value and its standard deviation were calculated and tabulated for further analysis. At the present study, rainfall pattern was fluctuated with the time period where the lowest rain fall was observed in 1983 and the peak was felt in 1985. Hereafter, the quantity of water was reduced than the optimum. And also, the higher drought condition was experienced in June, July and August of the whole years of the study. The total of 312 months were recorded for the future status and forecasting of the country in which 182 months experienced drought while 130 months were in wet nature in Mannar District. Further, 1982, 1983, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1999 and 2007 were with the extreme drought condition which highly deviated from the mean value and showed the negative nature of the district. Slight Drought, Moderate Drought, Severe drought, Extreme Drought and Far Extreme Drought were with the value of 4.4%, 15.9%, 17%, 22% and 41.2%, respectively. The manmade activities and the present