Abstract

The characterization of a given region through climatic indices contributes to the evaluation of weather demonstration, thus helping in agricultural strategic planning. The objective of this work was to separate the municipalities in the state of Sergipe, where the 52 rainfall stations are in homogeneous groups, based on the climatological water balance proposed by Thorntwaite and Mather in 1955, to obtain the climatic indices of aridity (Ia), water (Ih) and humidity (Iu). In this study, 30-year historical data series of meteorological variables of rainfall and air temperature were used for the climatological water balance of the following CAD values: 75, 100, 125 and 150 mm. To achieve the objectives of the work, the statistical technique of cluster analysis was used to construct the groups, which were visually evaluated through dendrograms and by the cophenetic correlation coefficient. Based on the results obtained, it was found that the aridity and water indices were better evaluated through the method of medium connection, obtaining six and seven groups, respectively. While the moisture index resulted in six groups using the complete bonding method. With this work it can be concluded that the maps of the spatializations of the groups found for the three indexes were well defined in the three regions of the state: coast, agreste and sertão of Sergipe.

Keywords
cluster analysis; aridity index; moisture index; water index