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Aridity conditions within the region of Oltenia (Romania) from 1961 to 2015

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Abstract

Aridity and drought assessment at a global level or within particular regions has lately gained an importance on the background of global warming, variability of rainfall amounts and, of course, their impact on social welfare. Aiming at understanding this impact, there were analysed spatial distribution (based on the data from 15 meteorological stations, generally covering the period 1961–2015) and temporal variability of three aridity indices. Thus, there were calculated De Martonne aridity index (IDM) at annual, seasonal and monthly level, Pinna combinative index (Ip) and Selyaninov’s hydrothermal coefficient (HTC). Ip indicates humid conditions all over the analysed area, with slight differences within the extra-Carpathian region, confirming thus that it does not give relevant results for the temperate region. IaDM illustrates a greater territorial differentiation, namely semi-humid conditions in the plain area and in the eastern part of the entire region, humid and very humid conditions in the Subcarpathians and the mountains. At monthly level, there are up to 5 months (in the plain area) with semiarid conditions, generally covering the summer period, as well as September and October. The same monthly pattern is highlighted by HTC, especially in the summer months, which are moderately or slightly arid, mainly in the plain area. However, if analysing the long-term trends (for IaDM), it results that there is not a statistically significant tendency of aridization in the analysed region.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are deeply thankful to the editor and reviewers, for their professional and pertinent suggestions that helped us improve the paper, as well as to Mihaela Vieru, for her linguistic assistance during the preparation of this manuscript. The authors are grateful to the researchers at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, for making available the MAKESENS template for data processing. We express our cordial gratitude towards several specialized Romanian institutions (the National Meteorological Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the County Inspectorates for Emergency Situations) for providing the site-specific mean monthly temperature and precipitation data used for the present analysis. Moreover, we would like to acknowledge the data providers in the European Climate Assessment & Dataset project (www.ecad.eu).

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  1. Faculty of Sciences, Geography Department, University of Craiova, Str. A. I. Cuza, no. 13, 200585, Craiova, Dolj, Romania

    Alina Ștefania Vlăduţ & Mihaela Licurici

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  1. Alina Ștefania Vlăduţ
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Correspondence to Alina Ștefania Vlăduţ.

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Vlăduţ, A.Ș., Licurici, M. Aridity conditions within the region of Oltenia (Romania) from 1961 to 2015. Theor Appl Climatol 140, 589–602 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03107-5

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