TRENDS IN EXTREME DAILY RAINFALL EVENTS IN LA PLATA BASIN

OLGA C. PENALBA AND FEDERICO A. ROBLEDO

Foz de iguazu

Conferencia; 8th International Conference on Southern Hemisphere Meteorology and Oceanography Society; 2006

The analysis of daily precipitation in Argentina and mainly La Plata Basin, is a subject of great interest due to the impact in the agronomical and hydrological issues. This interest is not merely climatological; it also affects other areas of the environment and society, specially when the extreme in the rainfall are taking into account. While rainfall statistics at hemisphere scale have merited attention of climatologists, regional scale rainfall still deserves interest in order to obtain new    views    to    describe    its    particular characteristics. Reasons for this include a lack of adequate data, since no climate factors (e.g. changes in station location) often bias extremes more than climatic means, and problems related to choosing appropriate thresholds to define extremes.In this paper, we are interested to quantify these changes and the spatial domain. The objectives of this study are to provide a study of the variations in the climate indices, giving by the frequency of daily precipitation and the persistence; how much of the yearly index comes from each season index and a quantification of these changes and their spatial domain. Special attention is given to interdecadal and interannual variations of the climate indices, used for monitoring climate variability.