Assessment of Precipitation Trends in the Sertão Paraibano Mesoregion

Abstract

The state of Paraíba, located in the northeastern region of Brazil, comprises 223 municipalities and covers an area of 56,469 km 2 . Paraíba is divided into four major mesoregions: Zona da Mata, Agreste, Borborema and Sertão Paraibano. For this study, the Sertão Paraibano mesoregion, a semiarid area, was chosen to understand vulnerability to climate change, taking into account the region's economic importance for water and energy supply. The Mann-Kendall non-parametric test was applied to evaluate trends in the historical series of monthly, trimestrial, biannual and annual precipitation data. The series utilized corresponded to the period 1912-2012 and were built from data generated by five meteorological stations distributed throughout the mesoregion. These stations are maintained by the Executive Agency for Water Management (AESA) and National Department of Works Against Drought (DNOCS). The results indicated increasing precipitation trends for the Sertão Paraibano mesoregion, especially in the annual evaluation, for the first semester of the year (January to June), for the trimester December-January-February and the month of January, with slopes between 2.67 mm/year and 5.45 mm/year. The results evidenced the need to deepen studies on the influence of climate change in the area, to promote prompt adaptation measures.

Analysis of the Space–Temporal Trends of Wet Conditions in the Different Rainy Seasons of Brazilian Northeast by Quantile Regression and Bootstrap Test

“…Studies by [60] and [61] found increasing trends in precipitation in this same area when analyzing extreme daily precipitation indices. This result corroborates the positive precipitation trends for the months of December to February in the State of Paraíba, detected by [62]. In the lower quantile, some stations presented weak trends of humidity in the north sector of the NEB (Figure 2a).…”

Evaluation of the TRMM product for monitoring drought over Paraíba State, northeastern Brazil: a trend analysis

“…From another point of view, Rao et al 73 evaluated the seasonal trends of rainfall over Brazil over 30 years and indicated that precipitation in the rainiest and driest periods over Paraíba State would increase, and events will tend to be wetter. Medeiros et al 74 , in turn, evaluated the rainfall trends in the Sertão Paraibano (1912–2012) and concluded that rainfall has positive trends, especially when considering annual and semiannual time scales. Notoriously, these were not the results obtained in this study, and this may be related to the period of analysis used.…”

Sustainable enhancement of district heating and cooling configurations by combining thermal energy storage and life cycle assessment

“…An initial approach to the study of climatic characterization and future trends was carried out by (Abrahao et al 2017), who verified that maximum temperature presented steep annual increments (p < 0.001, 0.07 °C/year). Although Abrahao et al (2017) focused on the production of electricity from solar and wind resources, climatic characterization and trends are very helpful to establish dynamic energy demands (Silva et al 2019(Silva et al , 2018Medeiros et al 2018;Medeiros et al 2019).…”