Spatial Variability and Cartography of Maximum Annual Daily Rainfall under Different Return Periods in Northern Algeria

The estimation of precipitation quantiles has always been an area of great importance to meteorologists, hydrologists, planners and managers of hydrotechnical infrastructures. In many cases, it is necessary to estimate the values relating to extreme events for the sites where there is little or no measurement, as well as their return periods. A statistical approach is the most used in such cases. It aims to find the probability distribution that best fits the maximum daily rainfall values. In our study, 231 rainfall stations were used to regionalize and find the best distribution for modeling the maximum daily rainfall in Northern Algeria. The L-moments method was used to perform a regionalization based on discordance criteria and homogeneity test. It gave rise to twelve homogeneous regions in terms of LCoefficient of variation(L-CV), L-Skewness(L-CS) and L-Kurtosis(L-CK). This same technique allowed us to select the regional probability distribution for each group using the Z statistic. The generalized extreme values distribution(GEV) was selected to model the maximum daily rainfall of 10 groups located in the north of the steppe region and the generalized logistic distribution(GLO) for groups representing the steppes of Central and Western Algeria. The study of uncertainty by the bias and RMSE showed that the regional approach is acceptable. We have also developed maximum daily rainfall maps for 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 years return periods. We relied on a network of 255 rainfall stations. The spatial variability of quantiles was evaluated by semi-variograms. All rainfall frequency models have a spatial dependence with an exponential model adjusted to the experimental semi-variograms. The parameters of the fitted semi-variogram for different return periods are similar, throughout, while the nugget is more important for high return periods. Maximum daily rainfall increases from South to North and from West to East, and is more significant in the coastal areas of eastern Algeria where it exceeds 170 mm for a return period of 100 years. However, it does not exceed 50 mm in the highlands of the west.

Quantification of relationship between annual daily maximum temperature and annual daily maximum rainfall in South Australia

The empirical relationship between annual daily maximum temperature(ADMT)and annual daily maximum rainfall(ADMR)was investigated.The data were collected from four weather stations located in Adelaide,South Australia,from 1988 to 2017.Due to the influence of sea surface temperature on rainfall and temperature,the distance from the weather station to the sea was considered in the selection of weather stations.Two weather stations near the sea and two inland weather stations were selected.Three non-parametric statistical tests(Kruskal–Wallis,Mann–Whitney,and correlation)were applied to perform statistical analysis on the ADMT and ADMR data.It was revealed that the temperature and rainfall in South Australia varies according to weather station location.The distance from the sea to the weather station was found to have limited influence on temperature and rainfall.Meanwhile,with the 0.05 level of significance,the association between ADMT and ADMR near sea stations is not as significant as the association between the two inland weather stations.It is relatively unrealistic to use ADMR to predict ADMT,or vice versa,since their correlation is not statistically significant(Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient:−0.106).