| Summary: | This goal of this research was to understand the occurrence of dry periods and wet periods in the northeastern United States over a 48 year period, from 1961 to 2008. An index that took into account daily precipitation and evaporation was developed and extreme value theory, a branch of statistics used to study extreme events, was used. Results from this work suggest that there has been a slight wetting trend across the Northeast over the period of study. Results also show that the extreme value theory's statistical distributions fit well to the maxima of the data but not the minima (max duration, max value in wet periods, etc.). Further work in this area would involve better analyzing the minima of the index data, as well as fitting the maxima data to more complicated trend lines and anomalies like the El Nino Southern Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation Indices.
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