Assessing homogeneous regions relative to drought class transitions using an ANOVA-like inference. Application to Alentejo, Portugal

In the present study, an ANOVA-like inference technique is used aiming at to assess if Alentejo, southern Portugal, could be considered a homogeneous region for drought management purposes. First, Alentejo was divided into four sub-regions according to latitude (north and south), and longitude (west and east). Inside each sub-region, 10 weather stations were considered. The time series of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) were obtained for these stations using precipitation data for the period 1932-1999 (67 years). Contingency tables for the transitions between SPI drought classes were obtained for these time series. Loglinear models were fitted to these contingency tables to estimate the probabilities for drought class transitions. An ANOVA-like inference was applied considering the four sub-regions like treatments of a two way layout with two factors, latitude and longitude, each one with two levels, north and south, and west and east respectively. The weather stations of each sub-region were treated as replicates. Significant differences between west and east were found, that allowed to consider that Alentejo could be composed by two sub-regions.