Study region: The study is carried out for northern Tunisia.

Study focus: Precipitations are often analysed via intensity or accumulation for a specified timescale (e.g., annual, seasonal, etc). We propose in this study to analyse regional rainfall variability by adopting a variable time step through the rain event concept. This event-based approach, ensures the integration of information related to rain intermittency, which is one of the fundamental properties of precipitations. This study focuses essentially on wet spells characteristics derived from the aggregation of daily winter dataset over a 50 years period (1960–2009). The multivariate analysis, based on the combination of two clustering approaches, i.e., self-organizing map and hierarchical clustering, allows the identification of different rainfall regimes. This study helps to understand rainfall variability patterns and to address rainfall regionalization and water use management issues.

New hydrological insights for the region: The winter precipitations of northern Tunisia are classified into 4 typical situations: Extremely dry seasons with a few short and weak rainfall events, dry seasons, with high frequency of weak events, intermediate seasons with medium amount of rain and intermittent events and rainiest seasons with long and intense events. The regionalization yields two geographical regions: northern sector characterized by rainy seasons, whereas the stations of the southern sector are mostly dry. The temporal variability analysis shows that the dry season classes dominate extending over three consecutive decades from 1970 to 2000.