On the Stationarity of Rainfall Quantiles: 1. Application and Evaluation of Conventional Methodologies

This study evaluated the statistical stationarity of rainfall quantiles as well as the rainfall itself. The conventional methodologies like the Cox-Stuart test for trend and Dickey-Fuller test for a unit root used for testing the stationarity of a time series were applied and evaluated their application to the rainfall quantiles. As results, first, no obvious increasing or decreasing trend was found for the rainfall in Seoul, which was also found to be a stationary time series based on the Dickey-Fuller test. However, the Cox-Stuart test for the rainfall quantiles show some trends but not in consistent ways of increasing or decreasing. Also, the Dickey-Fuller test for a unit root shows that the rainfall quantiles are non-stationary. This result is mainly due to the difference between the rainfall data and rainfall quantiles. That is, the rainfall is a random variable without any trend or non-stationarity. On the other hand, the rainfall quantiles are estimated by considering all the data to result in high correlation between their consecutive estimates. That is, as the rainfall quantiles are estimated by adding a stationary rainfall data continuously, it becomes possible for their consecutive estimates to become highly correlated. Thus, it is natural for the rainfall quantiles to be decided non-stationary if considering the methodology used in this study.