Abstract
Extreme weather, by definition, is any unexpected, unusual, unpredictable, severe or unseasonal weather condition. A rainfall event that is considered normal in one region may be considered a torrent in a dry region and may cause flash flooding. Therefore, appropriate weather warnings need to be issued with respect to areas with different climates. Additionally, these alerts should be easy to understand—by clear classification—in order to apply reinforcements. Early warning levels not only depend on the intensity and duration of rainfall events, but also on the initial water stress conditions, land cover situations and degree of urbanization. This research has focused on defining different warning levels in northwest Iran using long-term precipitation data from 87 weather stations well distributed across the study area. Here, in order to determine alert levels, TOPSIS (The Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), as one of the most common methods in multi-criteria decision making, has been used. Results show that five main levels of alerts can be derived, leading to the provision of spatial maps. Further, it can be deduced that these levels are highly associated to the location of a region at different times: months/seasons. It has been observed that the issuance of a warning for precipitation should correspond with the location and time. At one location during different seasons, different alert levels would be raised corresponding to the rainfall. It was also concluded that using of fixed alert levels and extending them to larger areas without considering the seasons could be grossly misleading.
Highlights
Extreme weather events affect many human activities such as the agriculture and horticulture industries, tourism and transportation
This paper aims to determine alert levels based on long-term precipitation amount and its frequency in a region
Provinces and annual precipitation are shown in Maximum precipitation occurs in early December but it occurs in late December and early January in the Southern half is [24]
Summary
Extreme weather events affect many human activities such as the agriculture and horticulture industries, tourism and transportation. From a climate point of view, some events are unexpected and incompatible with the climate conditions of the region; these are considered extreme events. Extreme events occur rarely, they directly impact on people and vulnerable regions [1]. The occurrence of extreme weather and climate is closely monitored because of the destruction it has caused in the past few years: the loss of human life and the associated cost impact [5]. Such events affect society, the economy and the environment [6]. The trend of extreme climate indexes based on daily time series of Climate 2017, 5, 33; doi:10.3390/cli5020033 www.mdpi.com/journal/climate
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