Abstract
An understanding of rainfall characteristics at multiple spatiotemporal scales is of great importance for hydrological, biogeochemical, and land surface modeling studies. The paper deals with the identification of rainfall spatial patterns and its relationship with local factors (altitude, longitude, and latitude) and rainfall of Iran. The employed data consists of rainfall values measured by the rainfall gauge network, spread over the country. The statistical test performed on the collected data included spatial auto-correlation, global Moran’s index, local Moran’s index, and hotspots. The results showed that the precipitation variation in Iran followed a clustering pattern with high concentration. Univariate Local Moran statistics of 0.92 indicates that strong spatial dependence in annual rainfall in Iran. Hotspot analysis revealed hot spots pattern in north, northwest and west and also cold spots in some parts of the center, east and south-east of Iran. Moreover we found a strong significant relationship between longitude, latitude and annual rainfall of Iran (−0.54 and 0.38 respectively) but the relation between altitude and annual rainfall is about 0.016.
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Balyani, S., Rointan, S., Qelichi, M.M. et al. Evaluating spatial structure of annual rainfall in relation to local factors in Iran. Spat. Inf. Res. 25, 411–420 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41324-017-0106-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41324-017-0106-6