SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION AND TEMPORAL VARIABILITY OF PRECIPITATION IN NORTHEASTERN ROMANIA

Spatial distribution and temporal variability of precipitation in northeastern Romania. In this article, the spatial distribution and temporal variability of precipitation in northeastern Romania are investigated for a period of 50 years (1961-2010) by using monthly data from 10 meteorological stations. Detrended kriging technique was employed for spatial modeling of precipitation amounts, while Mann-Kendall test and Sen's slope estimator was used to analyze the temporal evolution of precipitation time series. The results show that there exists a well-defined contrast between the more rainy western mountainous region and the drier eastern one. Southeastern regions of the analyzed area are the most exposed to dry conditions especially during the spring and summer seasons. The analysis of annual time series shows increasing trends of precipitation amounts in the analyzed area. Seasonal analysis indicates increasing precipitation in summer and autumn time series and decreasing in winter and spring. However most of the trends are statistically insignificant.