Abstract

BETTOLLI, María L; RIVERA, Juan A  and  PENALBA, Olga C. Regionalization of dry days in Argentina: A methodological approach. Meteorologica [online]. 2010, vol.35, n.2, pp.67-80. ISSN 1850-468X.

Objective regionalizations of different climatic variables have been performed in many regions of the World. For different purposes is convenient to make a spatial regionalization to find quasi-homogeneous climatic regions. The main objective of this work is to identify spatially homogeneous regions of dry days in Argentina with different temporal variabilities during summer season. In order to achieve regions with similar temporal variability in the amount of dry days, two methods are explored: principal component analysis (PCA) and k-means nonhierarchical cluster method. By means of a spatial patterns examination, the regionalization derived by k-means on the most important rotated principal components extracted is more adequate in comparison with the proposed by PCA method. Through this methodology, the country is divided in six main regions: Northeast region; Central-East region; Central and South Buenos Aires region; Northwest region; Central-West region; and Patagonia region, which are climatically consistent.

Keywords : Regionalization; Dry days; Droughts; Principal components analysis; K-means.

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