Spatiotemporal Analysis of Extreme Rainfall Frequency in the Northeast Region of Brazil
Fidel Ernesto Castro Morales, Daniele Tôrres Rodrigues, Thiago V. Marques, Ana Cleide Bezerra Amorim, Priscilla Teles de Oliveira, Cláudio Moisés Santos e Silva, Weber Andrade Gonçalves, Paulo Sérgio Lúcio
Abstract
Climate extreme events are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide, causing floods, drought, forest fires, landslides and heat or cold waves. Several studies have been developed on the assessment of trends in the occurrence of extreme events. However, most of these studies used traditional models, such as Poisson or negative binomial models. Thus, the main objective of this study is to use a space–time data counting approach in the modeling of the number of days with extreme precipitation as an alternative to the commonly used statistical methods. The study area is the Northeast Brazil region, and the analysis was carried out for the period between 1 January 1980 and 31 December 2010, by assessing the frequency of extreme precipitation represented by the R10 mm, R20 mm and R* indices.