B. Rajagopalan et U. Lall, SEASONALITY OF PRECIPITATION ALONG A MERIDIAN IN THE WESTERN UNITED-STATES, Geophysical research letters, 22(9), 1995, pp. 1081-1084
We investigate seasonality of daily precipitation along a meridian in
the Western U.S. using a nonparametric technique. The occurrence of da
ily precipitation is treated as a nonhomogeneous Poisson process and t
he time varying intensity function is estimated for every calendar day
using a kernel estimator. The technique is fully data adaptive. We ap
ply this technique to selected long record stations along a meridional
transect spanning from Tucson, AZ to Priest River ID. Differences in
the seasonality of precipitation occurrence and magnitude are revealed
as a function of latitude and topographic factors. A monotonic trend
in the seasonality of precipitation over the length of record is also
observed.