Software description : regional frequency analysis of climate variables (REFRAN - CV)

This document provides the technical description of a software to be developed in the context of the EUROCLIMA project. EUROCLIMA is a cooperation program between the European Union and Latin America with a special focus in knowledge sharing on topics related to socio-environmental problems associated with climate change. The objective of the project is to improve knowledge of Latin American decision-makers and the scientific community on problems and consequences of climate change, particularly in view of integrating these issues into sustainable development strategies. The software described in this document will have as a general objective to process time series of data from ground stations (initially precipitation and temperature) in order to generate products in the form of spatially-explicit maps. However, the software will be able to process any other time series of environmental spatial data. The main aspect characterizing this software is the use of statistics called L-moments to estimate the probability distribution function of climate variables. The L-moments are similar to other statistical moments, but with the advantage of being less susceptible to the presence of outliers and performing better with smaller sample sizes.