Comparing extreme sub-daily rainfall projections from temperature-scaling and convection-permitting climate models across an Alpine gradient

Abstract

Understanding projected changes in sub-daily extreme rainfall in mountainous basins can help increase our capability to adapt to and mitigate against flash floods and debris flows. Here we compare the changes in extreme rainfall projections from apparent Clausius-Clapeyron (CC) temperature scaling against those obtained from convection-permitting climate model simulations. Temperature and precipitation projections are obtained from an ensemble of convection-permitting climate models (CPM), which are suitable to the task given their ability to explicitly represent deep convection and to resolve the mountainous topography. The CPM data provided by the CORDEX-FPS Convection project at 1-hour temporal and remapped to 3 km spatial resolution, cover historical and far-future (2090-2099) time periods under the extreme climate change scenario (RCP8.5). Due to the computational demands however, CPM simulations are still too short (typically 10-20 years) for analyzing extremes using conventional methods. We use a non-asymptotic statistical approach (the Metastatistical Extreme Value, MEVD, Marani and Ignaccolo, 2015) for the analysis of extremes from short time periods, such as the ones of CPM simulations. We use hourly precipitation and temperature data from 174 stations in an orographically complex area in northeastern Italy as a benchmark.Results from our analysis reveal that the apparent CC temperature scaling method demonstrates effective performance when applied to 1-hour extreme rainfall projections and for high return periods. However, its accuracy decreases as the precipitation duration increases, highlighting potential limitations in accurately predicting changes in longer-duration extreme rainfall. Variations in performance are also noted when considering different return periods, as we find CPM changes depending on them, contradicting traditional CC-scaling. Furthermore, we show that elevation is a key factor influencing temperature variations, with higher elevation locations experiencing more pronounced temperature increases with respect to lowland areas. This affects more the results for 1 hr extreme rainfall projections, whereas it is less relevant for 24-h duration. These findings identify some serious limitations of traditional CC scaling and emphasize the need for a nuanced understanding of the scaling method's applicability under various conditions.