Temporal variability of monthly rains in Alegre – ES, Brazil

Abstract

The objective of this work was to study the temporal variability of monthly precipitation based on a historic series of 63 years (1940 – 2002) in Alegre- ES, by using semivariograms. First, an exploratory analysis of the data was performed using some statistical parameters, such as: average, standard deviation, median, lower and upper limits of the 95% confidence interval and box-plot. The months of May, September, November and December did not show precipitation outliers. The rainy and dry seasons are represented by six months each. The temporal analysis was performed using semivariance among the 756 months of the series. Among the months of each year a temporal variability of precipitation occurs depending on rainy and dry seasons, presenting stationarity of a certain month in different years in the studied series. The global climatic change did not alter the precipitation in the studied season.