Since climatic data for the first half of 2001 were not available in
Níjar station, we used forward stepwise regressions to estimate
the missing data. Variables were mean annual temperature, total
annual precipitation, and the mean temperatures and accumulated
precipitations of the MODIS 16-day MVC periods in Níjar (dependent
variables) and in the remaining stations (independent variables)
from 2002 to 2010. Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and
Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) were used as a trade-off
between significance and simplicity to select the final equations
used to fill Níjar gaps.