Analysis of the Space–Temporal Trends of Wet Conditions in the Different Rainy Seasons of Brazilian Northeast by Quantile Regression and Bootstrap Test

Drought causes serious social and environmental problems that have great impact on the lives of thousands of people all around the world. The purpose of this research was to investigate the trends in humid conditions in the northeast of Brazil (NEB) in the highest climatic precipitation quarters, November–December–January (NDJ), February–March–April (FMA), and May–June–July (MJJ), through the standardized precipitation and evapotranspiration index (SPEI), considering an alternative statistical approach. Precipitation and potential evapotranspiration (PET) time series for the calculation of the SPEI were extracted for the 1794 NEB municipalities between 1980 and 2015 from a grid dataset with a resolution of 0.25° × 0.25° using the bilinear interpolation method. The trends and statistical significance of the SPEI were estimated by quantile regression (QR) and the bootstrap test. In NDJ, opposite trends were seen in the eastern NEB (~0.5 SPEI/decade) and in the south (~−0.6 SPEI/decade). In FMA, most of NEB presented negative trends in the 0.50 and 0.95 quantiles (~−0.3 SPEI/decade), while in MJJ, most of NEB presented positive trends in all quantiles studied (~0.4 SPEI/decade). The results are consistent with observational analyses of extreme rainfall.