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Seasonality of precipitation along a meridian in the western United States
Author(s) -
Rajagopalan Balaji,
Lall Upmanu
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/95gl01100
Subject(s) - seasonality , climatology , precipitation , environmental science , transect , latitude , atmospheric sciences , geography , geology , meteorology , statistics , mathematics , geodesy , oceanography
We investigate seasonality of daily precipitation along a meridian in the Western U.S. using a nonparametric technique. The occurrence of daily precipitation is treated as a nonhomogeneous Poisson process and the time varying intensity function is estimated for every calendar day using a kernel estimator. The technique is fully data adaptive. We apply this technique to selected long record stations along a meridional transect spanning from Tucson, AZ to Priest River ID. Differences in the seasonality of precipitation occurrence and magnitude are revealed as a function of latitude and topographic factors. A monotonic trend in the seasonality of precipitation over the length of record is also observed.