중남미

The diurnal cycle is an important mode of climatic variability associated with different aspects of micro, meso and large scale meteorological phenomena. Thus, we performed a study of the space-time variability of the diurnal cycle of precipitation with hourly sampling and covering all regions of Brazil. The dataset was collected during the period of 13-year, from 1st January 2008 to 31th December 2020. We used data from 411 rain gauges installed in automatic weather stations. To evaluate regional aspects, we conducted a cluster analysis with different configurations (4, 5 and 6 groups). We identified a considerable heterogeneity in the hour of maximum precipitation in Brazil and three main types of diurnal cycle were observed: (i) maximum precipitation at mid- to late afternoon associated with strong local convection activity; (ii) diurnal cycle with intense precipitation during nighttime at the Amazon basin, the coast of Northeast Brazil and the Southern region; (iii) semidiurnal cycles with low precipitation rate at the Northeast Brazil.