Regionalisation of precipitation for the iberian peninsula and climate change

Publication date: Available online 26 July 2015 Source:Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C Author(s): A.C. Parracho, P. Melo-Gonçalves, A. Rocha Temporal variability of precipitation over the Iberian Peninsula (IP) has high spatial gradients. Therefore, statistics of the temporal behaviour of precipitation and derived quantities over the IP must be estimated taking into account these spatial gradients. Some statistics can be displayed over a map. However there are statistics, such as Probability Density Functions at each location of the IP, that are impossible to display in a map. Because of this, it is mandatory to reduce the number of degrees of freedom which, in this case, consists of a reduction of the time series representative of the IP domain. In this work, we present a spatial partition of the IP region into areas of similar precipitation. For that, an observed dataset of daily-total precipitation for the years between 1951 and 2003 was used. The land-only high resolution data was obtained on a regular grid with 0.2° resolution in the IP domain. This data was subjected to a K-means Cluster Analysis in order to divide the IP into K regions. The clustering was performed using the squared Euclidean distance. Four clusters of IP grid points, defining 4 IP regions, were identified. The grid points in each region share the same time-varying behaviour which is different from region to region. The annual precipitation discriminates the following region...
Source: Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts ABC - Category: Science Source Type: research