About time of occurrence of rainy days for Mediterranean and (sub)-Alpine areas

Spatial variability of dry spells duration statistical distributions

Dry spells duration and its extent in space, is a key factor in water resources problems. In order to modelling the empirical distribution of dry spells (DS) frequencies observed in Sicily (i.e. in a typical Mediterranean climate), Agnese et al. (2014) successfully applied the two-parameter polylogarithm-series distribution. Because of the strong seasonality characterising Sicily’s rainfall regime, statistical analysis was separately applied to two data sets, referred to as “dry” and “wet” seasons, respectively. In this work, a similar analysis was carried out for a set of 26 DS time-series recorded in a large area (about 30000 km2), including Piedmont and the Aosta Valley. Area altitude ra…

Modelling wet and dry spells for daily rainfall data series: an application to irrigation management in North-West Italy

Rainfall time variability is relevant for agricultural production. The daily time scale is often used in modelling crop and soil water balance. In this work a novel statistical analysis of wet and dry spells is presented, together with an application in an Italian area characterised by a relevant climate spatial variability, due to the presence of both high mountains (e.g.: Mont Blanc) and of the Mediterranean Sea. Statistical analysis of the sequences of rainy days, wet spells (WS), and that of no-rainy days, dry spells (DS), could be carried out separately (as widely applied in the past) or jointly, by introducing the inter-arrival time (IT), representing the time elapsed between two subs…

Trend of inter-arrival times of rainfall events for Italian Sub-Alpine and Mediterranean areas

Trends of some high quantiles of average and extremes inter-arrival timesand rainfall depths at daily scale for an Italian Sub-Alpine area

Modeling of rainfall statistical structure represents an important research area in hydrology, meteorology, atmospheric physics and climatology, because of the several theoretical and practical implications. The statistical inference of the alternation of wet periods (WP) and dry periods (DP) in daily rainfall records can be achieved through the modelling of inter-arrival time-series (IT), defined as the succession of times elapsed from a rainy day and the one immediately preceding it. It has been shown previously that the statistical structure of IT can be well described by the 3-parameter Lerch distribution (Lch). In this work, Lch was successfully applied to IT data belonging to a sub-al…

Modelling the frequency distribution of inter-arrival times from daily precipitation time-series in North-West Italy

Abstract The discrete three-parameter Lerch distribution is used to analyse the frequency distribution of inter-arrival times derived from 26 daily precipitation time-series, collected by stations located throughout a 28,000 km2 area in North-West Italy (altitudes ranging from 113 m to 2,170 m a.s.l.). The precipitation regime of these Alpine regions is very different (latitude 44.5 to 46.5 N) from the typical Mediterranean precipitation regime of the island of Sicily (latitude 37 to 38 N), where the Lerch distribution has already been tested and whose results are compared. In order to verify the homogeneity of the precipitation time series, the Pettitt test was preliminarily performed. In …

Statistical analysis of inter-arrival times of rainfall events for Italian Sub-Alpine and Mediterranean areas

Abstract. In this work a set of time-series of inter-arrival times of rainfall events, at daily scale, was analysed, with the aim to verify the issue of increasing duration of dry periods. The set consists of 12 time-series recorded at rain gauges in 1926–2005, six of them belong to an Italian Sub-Alpine area (Piedmont) and six to a Mediterranean one (Sicily). In order to overcome the problem related to limited sample size for high values of inter-arrival times, the discrete probability polylog-series distribution was used to fit the empirical data from partial (20 yr) time-series. Moreover, a simple qualitative trend analysis was applied to some high quantiles of inter-arrival times as wel…