Increasing the regional availability of the Standardized Precipitation Index: an operational approach

Using the normality assumption to calculate probability‐based standardized drought indices: selection criteria with emphases on typical events

“…(), Kumar et al . (), and Meschiatti and Blain () considering all values, including those representing zero precipitation records. On the other hand, Stagge et al .…”

“…() substituted samples with zero precipitation by artificially generated normally distributed SPI values before applying the Shapiro–Wilk test. Despite the high uncertainty of the true underlying distributions, we adopted the procedure used by Meschiatti and Blain (), Kumar et al . (), and Wu et al .…”

“…A similar feature with regards to parameter estimation methods is observed in the SPI literature. For instance, Meschiatti and Blain () have already provided evidences in favour of the use of the two‐parameter gamma distribution for calculating the SPI in a tropical–subtropical South American region. Although this latter study had been based on goodness‐of‐fit tests suggested by Stagge et al .…”

Impacts of climate change on drought: changes to drier conditions at the beginning of the crop growing season in southern Brazil

“…The weather stations ( Figure 1) were selected because they can support trend analyses that include the normal period , present no missing data and their consistencies have already been evaluated in previous studies (Blain 2011;Blain 2013;Blain and BardinCamparotto 2014;Meschiatti and Blain 2016). These stations also represent climatically dissimilar areas ranging from the coastal area (Pariquera -Açú), where there is virtually no dry season, to the northwestern region (Pindorama and Ribeirão Preto), where there is a distinctly dry season during the austral winter.…”

“…This latter statement holds either when the calibration process is applied to all available data or when there is no change in the underlying precipitation distributions among distinct analyzed periods (Wu et al 2005;Dubrovsky et al 2008). In this study, the 2-parameter gamma distribution was used to fi t the frequency distribution of precipitation data as suggested by several authors, including Stagge et al (2015) and Meschiatti and Blain (2016). Th is 2-parameter distribution is also used by the drought monitoring systems of several Brazilians institutions such as Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária and Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia.…”