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Even though temperature variation in Sri Lanka is in a narrow range, being an island it is vulnerable
to the changes happening in the global climate. In this paper, long-term trends in averages and
extremes of Sri Lankan temperature were studied. The temperature data analysed consist of 55years
of daily raw maximum and minimum temperature records from 20stations scattered throughout the
island. The non-parametric Mann-Kendall and Sen-Theil methods were used for the investigation.
The pre-whitening method was used to remove autocorrelation from the time series. To test the
data with seasons, the modified seasonal Mann-Kendall trend test was applied. Results show a
general increase in the maximum (Tmax) and average temperature (Tave) for most of the stations
island-wide and a few stations showed an increasing trend in Tmin. The Tave was significantly increased
for a majority of the stations in Sri Lanka during most of the months,especially the month of July,
during which the greatest number of stations showed an increase in Tave. Although it is difficult to
give reasons for such an increase, deforestation in recent decades may be responsible, together with
the global climate change, for the overall increase in the temperature of Sri Lanka. A regional trend
attribution study is suggested as a window for uture research.
