Analysis of the behavior of precipitation in Taubaté - SP in the daily time scale compared to El Niño and La Niña events

Abstract

Rainfall is a fundamentally important climatic element in the environmental sciences. It is therefore necessary to study and understand it, especially with the advent of "Global Warming," in which many researchers warn of increasing temperature and as a consequence of precipitation. This study used the technique of cluster analysis, a tool for multivariate analysis, to identify internally homogeneous groups in the precipitation time series from 1983 to 2010 (28 years). We used the Pearson correlation coefficient as a clustering function, and Ward's method to group and analyze the level of fusion to determine the final number of groups. Cluster analysis was applied to the entire series, and for this, the data were organized by days in matrices. The groups formed were compared with groups of years that the events of El Niño and La Niña occurred to see if these events had any influence on the climatology of the Taubaté region. The analysis of the groups revealed no evidence that the events of El Niño and La Niña influence the climate of Taubaté region.