Spatio-temporal distribution of atmospheric precipitation in the Odesa region at the beginning of the 21st century

Abstract

During the last decade of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century there was a need for a higher level of understanding of the climate system and development of opportunities to prevent climate change and, first of all, understanding of dangerous natural hydrometeorological phenomena. The research of the latter is based on contemporary ideas of the theory of climate whose main concepts found their further development in the study of changes and fluctuations of the today's climate. For its climatic characteristics the South of Ukraine is considered as a separate region. This is due to not only the influence of the Black Sea but also to the specific features of the atmospheric circulation. Precipitation is one of the most important characteristics of humidification and appears to be the most variable meteorological value both in space and time. According to the results of modern studies the amount of precipitation within the territory of Ukraine and its individual regions was changing at the end of the 20th century and this change is still observed at the beginning of the 21st century. Therefore, the purpose of this scientific study is to determine the peculiarities of the spatio-temporal distribution of atmospheric precipitation in the territory of the Odesa Region over the recent decades. To complete this task we used statistical methods of processing the output information which included time data for 00, 06, 12 and 18 hours.
 Based on peculiarities of the structure of the long-term course of atmospheric precipitation in the territory of the Odesa region the following five regions were defined: southern, northwest, northern, eastern and coastal. Using the integral Fourier transform we managed to determine probable periodic oscillations (quasi-two-month, quasi-three-month, half-year and quasi-ten-month ones).
 This article presents the main results of one of the sections of the research work "Forecasting of dangerous meteorological phenomena over the southern regions of Ukraine" which is performed at the Department of Meteorology and Climatology of the Odessa State Environmental University.