The main objective of this study is to provide information about recent trends of extreme rainfall over Ceará State, associating these extreme events with Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomalies in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Mann-Kendall method is applied to rainfall data of 18 rain gauges from 1971 to 2006 to obtain the trends. The results show that the drought intensity is increasing and the heavy precipitation events are decreasing and that the increase in the Pacific and north of equator Atlantic Ocean SST anomalies lead to an increase in the number of consecutive dry days in northern Ceará. Rainfall extreme indices have shown negative correlations with SST anomalies on Pacific and Tropical North Atlantic regions and positive with Tropical South Atlantic region. However, in southern Ceará region, the consecutive wet day behavior indicates that the rainy season is governed by other atmospheric systems, which needs to be more studied for better understanding.
Climate Change; Semi-arid; El Niño; anomaly
