Trend detection of annual and seasonal rainfall in Calabria (Southern Italy)

In order to investigate the behaviour of climatic and hydrological variables, several statistical and stochastic techniques are currently applied to time series. In the present study a statistical analysis of annual and seasonal precipitation has been performed over 109 cumulated rainfall series with more than 50 years of data observed in a region of Southern Italy (Calabria). Trend analyses have been made by using both nonparametric (Mann-Kendall test) and parametric (linear regression analysis) procedures. The long historical series of monthly rainfall data employed in this work have been previously processed through a pre-whitening (PW) technique in order to reduce the autocorrelation of rainfall series and its effects on outcomes of trend detection. The application of the above mentioned procedures has shown a decreasing trend for annual and winter-autumn rainfall and an increasing trend for summer precipitation. Moreover the Mann-Whitney test has been used to evidence the possible change points in the data. The higher percentages of rainfall series show possible year changes during decade 1960-1970 for almost all of the temporal aggregation rainfall. Copyright (C) 2009 Royal Meteorological Society