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…

Applying a probabilistic model of rainfall and snow days occurrence to daily series recorded in NW Italy.

Daily precipitation records exist spanning several decades. A valuable amount of climatic information exists in the time-series of interarrival times (IT), defined as the succession of times (number of days) elapsed from a rainy (or snowy) day to the one immediately preceding it.In a previous work, Agnese et al. (2014) have been successfully tested some probabilistic modelling of rain occurrence on Sicily rainfall data; particularly, the better fitting of IT’s observed frequencies was obtained by 3-parameter Lerch-series distribution. In this work thisdistribution is tested on 70 years of 20 precipitation time-series taken in the North-West Italy, both in the plain and in the mountains, up …