Spatial Modeling of Rainfall Patterns over the Ebro River Basin Using Multifractality and Non-Parametric Statistical Techniques

Abstract

Rainfall, one of the most important climate variables, is commonly studied due to its great heterogeneity, which occasionally causes negative economic, social, and environmental consequences. Modeling the spatial distributions of rainfall patterns over watersheds has become a major challenge for water resources management. Multifractal analysis can be used to reproduce the scale invariance and intermittency of rainfall processes. To identify which factors are the most influential on the variability of multifractal parameters and, consequently, on the spatial distribution of rainfall patterns for different time scales in this study, universal multifractal (UM) analysis-C1, α, and γs UM parameters-was combined with non-parametric statistical techniques that allow spatial-temporal comparisons of distributions by gradients. The proposed combined approach was applied to a daily rainfall dataset of 132 time-series from 1931 to 2009, homogeneously spatially-distributed across a 25 km × 25 km grid covering the Ebro River Basin. A homogeneous increase in C1 over the watershed and a decrease in α mainly in the western regions, were detected, OPEN ACCESSWater 2015, 7 6205 suggesting an increase in the frequency of dry periods at different scales and an increase in the occurrence of rainfall process variability over the last decades.

A study of the scaling properties of rainfall in spain and its appropriateness to generate intensity‐duration‐frequency curves from daily records

“…Several studies analysed the rainfall process in Spain from a fractal point of view: Oñate Rubalcaba () obtained a mean fractal dimension of 1.32 ± 0.01 for annual rainfall series recorded by 10 stations in the Iberian Peninsula, whereas Meseguer‐Ruiz et al () compared the fractal dimension of 10‐min rainfall data from 20 Spanish observatories with a concentration index (CI) expressing the relative weight of the rainiest days of a series on the total accumulated rainfall of that series. Other studies investigated the multifractal character of rainfall records in Spanish stations (Valencia et al , , ; García‐Marín et al , , ; Rodríguez et al , ).…”

Effects of water re-allocation in the Ebro river basin: A multiregional input-output and geographical analysis

“…The ERB provides water to more than 3 million people, living in over 1700 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2019.03.042 towns and villages, and is one of the most representative semi-arid river basins of the Mediterranean (Milano et al, 2013a). Moreover, according to Valencia et al (2015), a downward trend in water availability is observable in the ERB, as in other Mediterranean basins (Milano et al, 2013b) and other basins around the world (Gerten et al, 2008).…”