Spatial variability on dry days in Argentina. Emphasis in data problems

JUAN ANTONIO RIVERA; OLGA PENALBA; MARÍA LAURA BETTOLLI

Buenos Aires

Encuentro; CLARIS LPB Kick off meeting; 2008

CLARIS LPB

The knowledge of the regional behavior of dry days (days without precipitation) and his decadal-to-interdecadal variability could be a useful tool. For example, the monitoring of dry conditions, mainly in regions that has experienced the expansion of grain crops in the last years in the semi-arid borders of Argentina and are more sensitive to precipitation interannual variability. In many situations, social and economic impacts are proportional to the amount of dry days on a seasonal and annual basis. Two methods of developing dry days regionalization are explored: principal component analysis and cluster analysis, both on annual and seasonal basis. The climate observing system over South America exhibits serious deficiencies in spatial resolution and in data quality control, being able to affect certain methodologies. The main objective of this poster is to illustrate how the two clustering methods widely used in meteorological research are affected by the data set used.