Calculating seasonal rainfall precentage from netcdf file

Hey all,

Disclaimer- I am really new at MatLab so please forgive my ignorance (trying real hard to learn). MatLab 2017b

Here is my issue- I have downloaded a netcdf file (attached file) that contains monthly observations of precipitation from 1932-1991. What I need to do is calculate the percentage of rain that falls in the summer (July, August, September). I am beginning to set the problem up set-by-step so any help would be super awesome!! ;)

1. The matrix is 708 x 1 so I need to tell Matlab that, from the top, every set of 12 numbers is a year
2. then I need to add up all the values within each year for a total (annual precipiation)
3. Followed by adding up every value at 7,8,9 within the 12 number block (year).
4. Calculate % of summer rainfall, which should be JAS / annual for each year
5. Finally, average each year's summer rainfall.

This is for the purpose of saying from 1932-1991 the average % of rain that fell during the summer was x (should be around 40-50% as I have calculated several years by hand)

I can do this for a single year using super simple indexing, but how I get this to repeat and scale this up to a large data set is where I am stuck

Answer 1

[Jyotish Kumar]

Hi,

First, you can reshape your matrix X (which is 708*1)

Y=reshape(X, [12,59]);

Find sum of all the 59 columns which will give you Sum of all 12 months rainfall for every 59 year

S=sum(Y, 1);

Now initialize a matrix with Zeros of size 1*59 and compute sum of (July, August, September) rainfall for every 59 year.

A=zeros(1,59);

for i=1:59

A(i)= sum(Y(7:9, i));

end

Now calculate Percentage of (July, August, September) rainfall over year for all 59 year.

P=A./S;

Calculate average of percentage

Avg= sum(P)/59;

I hope, it helps you to solve your problem.