Statistical complexity in daily precipitation of NCEP/NCAR reanalysis over the Mediterranean Basin

ABSTRACT This study investigates a deterministic index (ID) for shaping regular coherent structures in meteorological and climatic variables. The developed ID was applied to the large‐scale daily precipitation series derived from the data sets of the reanalysis available from National Centres for En...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of climatology 2014-01, Vol.34 (1), p.155-161
Main Author: Tatli, Hasan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
conditional probability
deterministic index
Earth, ocean, space
Exact sciences and technology
External geophysics
Geophysics. Techniques, methods, instrumentation and models
information theory
Mediterranean
Meteorology
NCEP/NCAR
persistence index
precipitation
Water in the atmosphere (humidity, clouds, evaporation, precipitation)
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Summary:ABSTRACT This study investigates a deterministic index (ID) for shaping regular coherent structures in meteorological and climatic variables. The developed ID was applied to the large‐scale daily precipitation series derived from the data sets of the reanalysis available from National Centres for Environmental Prediction/National Centre for Atmospheric Research for the period of 1950–2011 over the Mediterranean Basin. In order to show advantages and disadvantages of ID, its results were compared with two other persistence indexes known in the literature. One of persistence index is estimated by using autocorrelation function (IACF), and the other is based on conditional probability (ICP). Following the patterns of ID, the low values are obtained over the countries facing the sea including Greece, Italy, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Slovenia, France, Portugal, Spain, Morocco and Tunisia, almost all of which are characterized with dry summer subtropical Mediterranean climate. On the other hand, the meaningful climatic patterns of IACF are observed only over the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time as employing ICP to wet state of the precipitation series, the same patterns are obtained as IACF. However, for dry state, ICP produces noticeable similar patterns to ID, generally in arid and semi‐arid areas. The major results show that the patterns estimated by ID could be better understandable in point of view of its representing traditional spatio‐temporal meteorological features. That is, the patterns of ID correspond to well‐known climatic and weather features for large‐scale daily precipitation values associated with influences of the atmospheric disturbances and physical geographical features such as topography and land–sea distribution over the Mediterranean Basin. Copyright © 2013 Royal Meteorological Society
ISSN:0899-8418
1097-0088
DOI:10.1002/joc.3673