Relating Climatic Variables to Geographic Features in Greece

This study aims at investigating the relationship of climatic variables with geographic features over Greece. Seasonal and annual climate normals of temperature, rainfall and relative humidity covering the period from 1975 to 2004, from 85 meteorological stations of the Hellenic National Meteorological Service network are included in the analysis. Several geographical and environmental parameters such as altitude, location, slope, aspect, distance to coast, sea/land ratio and vegetation index obtained from a coastline dataset, a digital elevation model and a land cover database were examined for their dependencies with climatic elements. The relationship of a climate element with each geographical variable was investigated by means of graphical (e.g. scatter plots) and statistical scores. The results were used to assess the ability of each geographical parameter to explain part of the spatial variability of a climate variable. Backward stepwise linear regression was used to obtain a surface that gives the best fit to the measured climatic data. The adjusted determination coefficient (R 2 adj ) was computed to evaluate the efficiency of each model. Elevation, latitude and NDVI were found to be the most important predictors, whereas other geographical parameters contribute less to the model predictability.