Jointly modeling drought characteristics with smoothed regionalized SPI series for a small island

The paper refers to a study on droughts in a small Portuguese Atlantic island, namely Madeira. The study aimed at addressing the problem of dependent drought events and at developing a copula-based bivariate cumulative distribution function for coupling drought duration and magnitude. The droughts w...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Espinosa, Luis Angel, Portela, Maria Manuela, Pontes Filho, João Dehon de Araújo, Studart, Ticiana Marinho de Carvalho, Santos, João Filipe, Rodrigues, Rui
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2019
Country:Brasil
Institution:Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)
Repository:Repositório Institucional da Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.ufc.br:riufc/70693
Online Access:http://www.repositorio.ufc.br/handle/riufc/70693
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Standardized precipitation index
Drought
Madeira
Moving average
Principal components analysis
Copulas
Description
Summary:The paper refers to a study on droughts in a small Portuguese Atlantic island, namely Madeira. The study aimed at addressing the problem of dependent drought events and at developing a copula-based bivariate cumulative distribution function for coupling drought duration and magnitude. The droughts were identified based on the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) computed at three and six-month timescales at 41 rain gauges distributed over the island and with rainfall data from January 1937 to December 2016. To remove the spurious and short duration-dependent droughts a moving average filter (MA) was used. The run theory was applied to the smoothed SPI series to extract the drought duration, magnitude, and interarrival time for each drought category. The smoothed series were also used to identify homogeneous regions based on principal components analysis (PCA). The study showed that MA is necessary for an improved probabilistic interpretation of drought analysis in Madeira. It also showed that despite the small area of the island, three distinct regions with different drought temporal patterns can be identified. The copulas approach proved that the return period of droughts events can differ significantly depending on the way the relationship between drought duration and magnitude is accounted for.