Abstract

ARELLANO-LARA, FABIOLA  and  ESCALANTE-SANDOVAL, CARLOS A.. Multivariate delineation of rainfall homogeneous regions for estimating quantiles of maximum daily rainfall: A case study of northwestern Mexico. Atmósfera [online]. 2014, vol.27, n.1, pp.47-60. ISSN 0187-6236.

Lack of data in maximum daily rainfall frequency analysis can generate inefficient estimates for design purposes. An approach to diminish these errors is to apply regional estimation techniques, which require that all stations be located at the same homogeneous region. In this paper, a delineation of homogeneous precipitation regions was made based on the multivariate methods of principal component analysis and hierarchical ascending clustering. A region in northwestern Mexico was selected to apply this methodology. It was concluded that only the coefficients of variation of the L-moments, along with latitude, longitude and altitude at each climatological station are sufficient to define the homogeneous rainfall regions, and that either the inclusion or exclusion of information in the regional techniques has a direct impact on the estimation of events associated to different return periods.

Keywords : Homogeneous rainfall regions; principal component analysis; hierarchical ascending clustering; regional frequency analysis.

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