The influence of nonlinear trends on the power of the trend-free pre-whitening approach

The Mann-Kendall test has been widely used to detect trends in agro-meteorological as well as hydrological time series. Trend-free pre-whitening (TFPW-MK) is an approach that improves the performance of this test in the presence of serial correlation. The main goal of this study was to evaluate the...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Blain, Gabriel Constantino
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2014
Country:Brasil
Institution:Universidade Estadual de Maringá (UEM)
Repository:Acta Scientiarum. Agronomy (Online)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:periodicos.uem.br/ojs:article/18199
Online Access:http://www.periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/ActaSciAgron/article/view/18199
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Mann-Kendall
serial correlation
climate change
Description
Summary:The Mann-Kendall test has been widely used to detect trends in agro-meteorological as well as hydrological time series. Trend-free pre-whitening (TFPW-MK) is an approach that improves the performance of this test in the presence of serial correlation. The main goal of this study was to evaluate the ability of TFPW-MK to detect nonlinear trends. As a case study, this approach was also applied to 10-day values of precipitation (P), potential evapotranspiration (PE) and the difference between P and PE (P- PE) obtained from the weather station of Ribeirão Preto, State of São Paulo, Brazil. The results obtained from Monte Carlo simulations indicate that upward convex trends increase the power of this test, while upward concave trends decrease its power. The results obtained from the location of Ribeirão Preto reveal an increasing pressure on agricultural water management due to growing PE values. Thus, we conclude that the power of the TFPW-MK is affected by the shape of the trend and that the hypothesis of the absence of climate change in the abovementioned location cannot be accepted.