Temperature in the Brazilian northeast via gap analysis

Abstract

The Northeast region is characterized by drought, caused by several factors, including the ge ographical location. The lacunarity evaluates the quantity and size distribution of gaps within a data set and it’s very explored in ecological and climatic events. The knowledge of the air temperature becomes important because of its major contribution in various areas of knowledge, particularly in meteorology, oceanography, climatology and hydrology. This study aims to characterize the temperature of Northeast Brazil by Analysis lacunarity. The database is composed of 91 meteorological stations with values of time temperature in the period from 01 January 2008 to 1 January 2011. In the analysis of the air tempe rature, the lacunarity is a measure of the distribution of segments, defined as a sequence of consecutive time with temperature values equal to or greater than a threshold, and the gaps defined as sequences of consecutive time with temperature values of the air below the selected threshold. For evaluation the lacunarity were used thresholds of 27,30 e 32◦C. It is observed that as we increase the temperature th reshold the values of lacunarity exponent β decreases. The lacunarity analysis proved to be very effective for the temperature variation in the northeast region. For stations with high temperatures the lacunarity values are more homogeneous.