Climatic trends of temperatures and precipitation in Brazilian localities

Abstract

In recent decades, scientific and academic researchers around the world have been concerned with the assessment of regional and global climate trends.  Under the hypothesis of the presence of climate change in Brazil, the aim of this work was to verify annual climate trends of maximum and minimum air temperatures and precipitation in 243 localities over all the Brazilian political regions. The data were obtained from National Institute of Meteorology. In this work there were identified and analysed trends in annual time series distributed between in 1961 and 2017. The detections and analyses were performed by the application of the statistical tests of Mann-Kendall and the Pettitt to evaluate the presence of statistical trends. The statistical results and the trend distributions maps show that, from all the studied localities, for maximum temperature indicate increasing trends in 35% of the series, decreasing trends in 1 and no trends in 64%. The minimum temperature showed increasing trends in 30% of the analysed series, decreasing in 8% and no trends in 63%. The precipitation, showed increasing trends in 6% of the studied series, decreasing in 4 and no trends in 91%. The observed climate trends can be related to anthropological activities like urban spraw, industrial development and increasing population density.