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I am developing a remote sensing model and I also want to consider the climate data.

My question is, how can I define a dry/wet season for a country like e.g. Austria?
I have the weather data for three years and I would like to separate the dates into dry and wet.

Jan Doggen
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Oumnia Asadian
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    Probably depends on your needs on how the dry/wetness affects remote sensing. – Communisty Nov 28 '17 at 12:14
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    I am actually wanna study if there is a relation between my model( created from satellite data) and soil factors! do you think its right I only seperate rainy and not rainy days? Sorry if its stupid! I am not very much into this field – Oumnia Asadian Nov 28 '17 at 12:18
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    So I'm guessing that your model detects soil moisture. Soil moisture isn't straightforward as it depends on how rainy has it been before, soil type, temperature (evaporation). Simplest way would be to say a day is wet if rain is recent and dry when it has been longer time from rain. Other factors that would make the guess better: different soil types hold water differently, the warmer it is the stronger is the evaporation. – Communisty Nov 28 '17 at 12:29
  • No my model wanna detect the permenant soil factors( if actually can) – Oumnia Asadian Nov 28 '17 at 12:40
  • Then why do you need wetness information? – Communisty Nov 28 '17 at 12:46
  • I just want to have different climate change and see if there is a relation! so there no general way to define dry/ wet season in europe climate? – Oumnia Asadian Nov 28 '17 at 13:07
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    As I understand it your model might or might not be sensitive to moisture of the soil as soil type is what it should detect. Climate here is the wrong term as it doesn't display short term variation of wetness (parameter of interest). You could just select rainy days as wet and unrainy as dry, but that isn't quite accurate description of wetness is it? As I suggested on previous comment you could take into account time from rain and temperature to make it more accurate. – Communisty Nov 28 '17 at 13:18
  • Then you could compare if there in fact is a sensitivity to moisture in your model or not. – Communisty Nov 28 '17 at 13:18
  • This question might not have an answer, since Austria is in a climate zone whose seasons are driven by temperature rather than rainfall. Remote sensing is typically done in the winter when the leaves are off the trees. – Spencer Nov 28 '17 at 23:26
  • ah I see, but in general I can take half years, April-September and October-March, right? I know got it that taking rainy days as wet season and not rainy for dry season is compelety wrong and not very scientific. But anywas thanks for your answers :) – Oumnia Asadian Nov 29 '17 at 08:13
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    See here. Rain is "quite evenly distributed over the entire year, but May, September and the first half of October tend to be the driest, April and November tend to be the wettest periods." Altitude also affects rainfall - higher regions have more rain. There is no wet or dry, just wetter or drier. Maybe you need to decide if rainfall below a certain value is classified as "dry". – Fred Nov 29 '17 at 10:59
  • See also this question. Also I know you didn't get the best answer here, but please don't reask the same questions. If one feels their post needs new attention, try editing it to add a more complete description of what you're doing. But I do think you may not find people with enough specialism to answer your particular question, and agree with others; you can't force wet/dry seasons on regions that don't have them, and may be better suited to base it on actual rain events. – JeopardyTempest Jan 23 '18 at 04:53

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Two approaches:

  1. Search tourist websites for the countries you are interested in. They very often have average data on temperature and rainfall by month.

  2. Just Google countryname monthly rainfall. You may get general descriptions instead of hard (tabular) data, but since you only have to collect the data once, that's doable.

But as you get from the comments below your post, how useful that data is remains doubtful.

As an example: The first hit for the austria monthly rainfall search says:

... altitude determines the precipitation pattern; while high-level areas in the Alps may have a high average rainfall in excess of 2000 mm per year, while some regions in the flatlands of Austria have only 600 mm annually.

(emphasis mine)

Note that this page mentions the WeatherOnline (UK) Climate of the world page as its source. There you have descriptions for many countries.

Jan Doggen
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