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The Caminho da Caiçara II archaeological site is located in the village of Cadoz Velho, a rural area in the municipality of Piripiri, Piauí, Brazil. It consists of a large vertical wall and a small sandstone block containing 101 rock paintings in red and yellow colors. There are abstract figures and human handprints, as well as a bird's footprint and a spear-thrower. There are rock engravings in the shape of cupules. This paper reports the results of in situ monitoring of environmental parameters such as ambient air temperature and relative humidity, rock temperature in areas with and without rock paintings, as well as the speed of the winds that reach the archaeological site under investigation. The experimental data obtained indicate that the thermal action on the pictorial films of the rock paintings from the Caminho da Caiçara II site is clearly more intense than in other nearby archaeological sites. Direct sunlight on the rock paintings for most of the day and year is the main agent responsible for the high heating of the pictorial films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We evaluated the performance of the Thornthwaite (ThW) method using two gridded climate datasets to estimate monthly average daily potential evapotranspiration (PET). The PET estimated from two gridded series were compared to PET and to reference evapotranspiration (ETo) determined, respectively, through the ThW and Penman-Monteith model parameterized on Food and Agriculture Organization–Irrigation and Drainage paper No 56 (PM-FAO56) using data from weather stations. The PET by ThM was based on monthly air temperature series (1961–2010) from two gridded datasets (Global Historical Climatology Network-GHCN and University of Delaware-UDel) and 21 weather stations of the National Institute of Meteorology (INMET) located in Southeastern Brazil. The ETo PM-FAO56 used monthly climate series (1961–2010) on sunshine duration, air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed from weather stations of the INMET. The PET estimated using UDel gridded series was better overall performance than the GHCN series. Differences in altitude, latitude, and longitude were the main geographic factors determining the performance of the PET estimates using gridded climate series. Depending on the factors, some locations require bias correction, especially locations more than 10 km away from the grid point. The gridded datasets are an alternative for locations without climatic series data or with low-quality non-continuous data series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]