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NEW PRECIPITATION INDICES FOR MONITORING DROUGHT - AN ANALYSIS OF THE PRECIPITATION REGIMES OF GERMANY AND THE IBERIAN PENINSULA IN THE COURSE OF THE CLIMATE CHANGE
Abstract
Climate change is one of the greatest global challenges of the 21st century and has manifested itself over the past few decades through extreme weather conditions, rising sea levels, and through oscillating temperatures and precipitation regimes. While temperature and precipitation data are available on a daily basis, precipitation data are more susceptible to measurement errors, have a lower spatial representation and are asymmetrically distributed. While previous studies on precipitation changes have predominantly focused on the development of mean values and torrential rainfall, the occurrence of precipitation-free days has attracted little attention. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare meteorological drought in Germany and the Iberian Peninsula, two geographically and climatically very different regions, against the background of climate change. New parameters based on daily precipitation data were set up as an alternative to existing indices and applied to data sets that range over six decades. The investigations aimed at obtaining drought parameters such as the minimum rainfall amount within a fixed time interval and the duration of drought periods, which are understood as days without or with very little precipitation amounts. These parameters allow precipitation changes to be detected not only in quantity, but also in their seasonality and in the patterns of spatial distribution. The results of this investigation are represented as maps that show the interpolated values of our new indices. These maps provide information and understanding of the regional differences in changes in the precipitation regime. This study has shown that these new parameters are applicable to precipitation data from climatically different regions.
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