In this article, we generalize the power Lindley distribution using a
quadratic rank transmutation map to develop a transmuted power Lindley distribution. The new distribution exhibits, in addition to decreasing, increasing and bathtub hazard rate, depending on its parameters also unimodal hazard rate. A comprehensive mathematical properties of this distribution is provided. Some expressions for the moments, order statistics, quantiles function are derived. The model parameters are estimated by the maximum
likelihood method. A Monte Carlo experiment on the finite sample behavior of the MLEs is performed. A real climatological data set was used in order to show the applicability of the new model and different statistics of fit were used as selection criteria.