The Recent Rainfall Climatology of the Mediterranean Californias

Abstract

In this work, recent (1948?2001) rainfall data in a southwestern California station (San Diego) and a northwestern Baja California station (Ensenada) within a region called Mediterranean California, around 33°N, 117°W, are studied. Cumulative annual means are used as indicators of climatological variability; but the entire datasets are analyzed by modeling the histogram of each set as a Weibull distribution probability density function, f. The climatology of both stations, defined simply as the arithmetic average, is compared with their theoretical mean; that is, the first moment of f. It is assumed that this comparison would be indicative of the reliability of the available rainfall climatologies. If these assumptions hold, in particular if the data is indeed Weibull distributed, it can be concluded that the climatological annual mean precipitation in this region is slightly overestimated at this time.