Diagnosing warm‐season rainfall variability in Mexico: a classification tree approach

Abstract

Many observational studies provide evidence that connects seasonal rainfall variations over parts of the subtropical and tropical Americas with the behaviour of large-scale climate modes. This paper extends these claims based on analysis of a fairly extensive historical rainfall data set from several locations in Mexico. The paper applies classification tree (CT) analysis to link warm-season rainfall variability to climate indices, which characterize ENSO state, the NAO, and sea-level pressure in the eastern North Pacific. While the results generally indicate that a significant part of the variability in warm-season rainfall over Mexico is conditioned by large-scale climate modes, there is only limited evidence of simple lag relationships involving Mexican rainfall and antecedent climate behaviour. The main implication here is that advances in warm seasonal rainfall prediction are likely to depend partially on improved capabilities to foreshadow the behaviour of large-scale climate modes a season or more in advance.

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“…The modeling centers based in the United States provided daily precipitation forecast data from coupled atmosphere-ocean-land models, and SMN submitted monthly regional and national precipitation forecasts developed using an analog clustering technique described by Englehart and Douglas [2009] WKML also provides tools to access the Google Chart Api™. For example, these tools can be used to generate a chart from data held in an array associated with a particular location shown as a grid cell, which can be displayed by a mouse click.…”

Weather regimes associated with summer rainfall variability over southern Mexico

“…The study of rainfall variability over Mexico is of crucial relevance, given its importance for agriculture (Liverman, ; Conde et al ., , ), hydroelectric power generation (Blackshear et al ., ) and overall human livelihood. Therefore, many studies have focused on rainfall variability over Mexico (García, ; Magaña et al ., , ; Englehart and Douglas, , Cavazos et al ., ; Magaña and Caetano, ; Romero‐Centeno et al ., ; Vázquez‐Aguirre, ; Liebmann et al ., ; Englehart and Douglas, ; Méndez and Magaña, ; Mendoza et al ., ). A large variety of climates is observed in Mexico, from the dry deserts in the north to the tropical forests in the mountainous southern regions, which have different time scales of variability.…”