Precipitation changes in Greece over the past century; what type of stochastic description should we use?

In the presence of long-range dependence, several difficulties emerge in stochastic methods, especially in intermittent and highly-skewed processes, such as precipitation, which cannot be fully supported by the established models in the literature. Here, we analyze a large set of rainfall data in Greece comprising ground records as well as non-conventional data from reanalyses and satellite, and we identify cluster periods of droughts and wet-years in both extreme tails, raising the challenge for their stochastic description. In this light, and after statistical analysis of the whole dataset, we apply the latest version of a genuine stochastic method (i.e., direct use of the process of interest without any transformation, and with a focus on the long-range dependence under various stochastic behaviours; Koutsoyiannis and Dimitriadis, 2021), and we discuss on the implications of the results for future hydrological design scenarios.