Espacio y Desarrollo (Oct 2007)
Las sequías de la región del Noroeste Argentino y su relación con las temperaturas costeras superficiales del mar
Abstract
The main source of water vapor in the terrestrial climatic system is in the oceans. Warm waters favor the evaporation processes and air vertical movements, while cold waters brings decrements of the processes and the air remains stratified.Much research has been made to show the importance of the atmosphere-ocean interaction in generating the atmospheric fluctuations responsible for the rains and droughts on the continents. Northwestern Argentina is closer to the Pacific Ocean than the Atlantic. However, mostwater vapor comes from the latter due to the orographic conditions: there are mountain chains that affect significantly the regional climate, especially the geographic distribution of rainfall. In this paper I want to investigate the influence of thermic fluctuations of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans surface waters in rainfall variation. To do this, I used monthly data of the thermic anomalies in the coastal stations: Lima, Río de Janeiro, and Rio Gallegos in the period 1951-1980. It was also considered the regional drought index of that period. A contingency and correlation analysis was used for each month per year, the month in itself (diagnostic) and six months before (prognostic) between the drought index of the NOA (IS) with the thermic indexes of the Pacific and Atlantic continental borderlands in two latitudes: tropical and sub-polar.It was found that the regional droughts of the NOA are related mainly to the thermic negative anomalies of the coastal oceanic waters.
