Construction of daily precipitation series and the observational characteristics of extreme precipitation in Tianjin, China during 1888–2022

Abstract

Given the difficulties in rescuing and ensuring the quality of long-term climate data, current studies on century-scale climate change are usually limited to annual and monthly data, resulting in the poor detection of extreme climate events and their changes before 1950. In this study, we reconstructed a daily precipitation series for Tianjin from 15 September 1887 to 31 December 2022 on the basis of the most comprehensive daily precipitation records collected from the Tianjin Meteorological Archive, China, and in reference to the precipitation analysis results based on the datasets developed by the Climatic Research Unit Time-Series version 4.06, Global Precipitation Climatology Centre and University of Delaware along with the application of various homogenisation methods for climate series. Our approach provides a complete and reliable century-long daily precipitation series for the study of regional or local extreme weather and climate events. The reconstructed daily dataset reveals that the annual precipitation amount and R95 intensity in Tianjin during 1888–2022 lack significant trends and have values of 0.74 ± 6.99 and −1.84 ± 3.22 mm per decade, respectively. On the annual and seasonal scales, the precipitation amount and R95 intensity, particularly those in autumn, have increased since the latter half of the 20th century relative to those in 1888–1950. However, the increase in precipitation amount and R95 intensity is relatively limited compared with that in atmospheric water vapour content due to surface warming, indicating the highly sensitive response of extreme precipitation events to warming. In addition, the estimates for the return periods of 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 years covering 1888–2022, 1888–1950 and 1951–2022 depict that the intensity of heavy rain and above magnitude was highest in 1888–1950 and decreased in 1951–2022.