Provisional Climatological Normals from 1991 to 2010 for Rio Grande RS

Abstract In January 1989, the conventional weather station in Rio Grande, which belongs to the Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia from Brazil, was moved from the downtown area to the campus of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande. The Provisional Climatological Normals for Rio Grande, in the period 1991-2000, were determine using the data from this station, following the rules of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The results were published in a book in the early 2000s. After more than a decade of that publication, the study was updated considering the period from 1991 to 2010. Therefore, in this paper, we present the procedures for quality control of data from conventional surface meteorological stations and for the determination of the Provisional Climatological Normals from 1991 to 2010, in Rio Grande. Moreover, we compared the Provisional Climatological Normals from 1991-2000 and 2001-2010. Non-homogeneities were identified in the time series of relative humidity and wind speed, which prevent the evaluation of the normals for these variables. Rio Grande is a city with little monthly variability of precipitation, has hot summer and cold winter and, according to the climatic classification of Köppen, the climate is temperate without a dry season and hot summer, denominated Cfa, and, according to the Strahler classification, is a moist subtropical climate.