90-Year Precipitation and Temperature Data for Santiago de Chile (Quinta Normal Measuring Station)

We have looked at the meteorological/climatological yearbooks (Anuarios Meteorologicos 1920-1996/Anuario Climatologico 1997-2010) available for the period of 1920 to 2010 at the website of the Chilean Metearological Services (Dirección Meteorological de Chile). The data is unfortunately only available in pdf format, so we had to get through each report and retrieve the data manually. The datapoints for 1930 and 1962 were omitted as for the former, the 1931 reports was posted and for the latter data was not available for the Quinta Normal measuring station (we pondered whether to replace with Cerillos measuring station for 1962).

The following shows the time series for precipitation and temperature:

 

The correlation matrix looks as follows. No surprises: temperature is correlated with AMO annd precipitacion with ENSO.

The temperature in Santiago (Quinta Normal) and AMO track each other quite closely. The increase in temperature was roughly 0.008 °C per year during the observation time.

Correlation between precipitacion and ENSO is not so strong, but it is still visible from the following graph that high precipitation years typically go together with negative SOI values and vice versa. 2012 was a neutral year in terms of the ENSO cycle and a below average year in terms of precipitation.