Una aproximación causal a las señales globales que influyen en la lluvia de la cuenca del Machángara

Abstract

Rain has always had an essential role in human life. It can cause a civilization to grow or be destroyed, a group of people to remain in an area or be forced to migrate, it can also cause floods, landslides, or a lack of it, droughts. Rainfall behavior is difficult to predict, and efforts are constantly being made to improve predictability. In Cuenca, Ecuador, the Machángara River has the Tixán drinking water treatment plant (the largest in Ecuador) and two power plants (Saymirín and Saucay), projects of great importance for the city. Knowing what factors affect rainfall in this area helps improve its predictability and make better decisions in the management of water resources. For this purpose, various climate indices from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and rainfall measurements at eight stations in the aforementioned watershed were used. A method based on information theory, the transfer entropy method, was selected to measure the influence from each of the indices to each of the climatological stations through PyIF library. This work calculates the entropy transfer between different global climatic indexes (which measure ocean temperature, atmospheric pressure, solar activity, and others) and their influence on the Machángara river basin. The results indicate that the indices related to the Pacific Ocean, the El Niño phenomenon, and the Caribbean Sea are the ones that have the greatest ET and, therefore, have the greatest influence on rainfall in the Machangara river basin.