Abstract
The unique characteristics of topography, landforms, and climate in the Loess Plateau make it especially important to investigate its extreme precipitation characteristics. Daily precipitation data of Loess Plateau covering a period of 1959–2017 are applied to evaluate the probability features of five precipitation indicators: the amount of extreme heavy precipitation (P95), the days with extreme heavy precipitation, the intensity of extreme heavy precipitation (I95), the continuous dry days, and the annual total precipitation. In addition, the joint risk of different combinations of precipitation indices is quantitatively evaluated based on the copula method. Moreover, the risk and severity of each extreme heavy precipitation factor corresponding to 50-year joint return period are achieved through inverse derivation process. Results show that the precipitation amount and intensity of the Loess Plateau vary greatly in spatial distribution. The annual precipitation in the northwest region may be too concentrated in several rainstorms, which makes the region in a serious drought state for most of the year. At the level of 10-year return period, more than five months with no precipitation events would occur in the Northwest Loess Plateau. While, P95 or I95 events of 100-year level may be encountered in a 50-year return period and in the southeastern region, which means there are foreseeable long-term extreme heavy precipitation events.
Highlights
In the past half century, extreme precipitation events have increased remarkably and may be more frequent and severe over the mid-latitudes in the context of global warming [1,2,3]
The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively evaluate the joint risk of multiple extreme precipitation indicators in the Loess Plateau and make a comprehensive description of the multi-type risks
The general extreme value (GEV) distribution, Gamma, P3, LN, LP III, and Weibull distributions were the candidate models which were applied to quantify the probabilistic characteristics for different extreme precipitation indicators
Summary
In the past half century, extreme precipitation events have increased remarkably and may be more frequent and severe over the mid-latitudes in the context of global warming [1,2,3]. Extreme weak precipitation is the occurrence of no precipitation or very little precipitation for a long time, which can cause long-term droughts to the region Both extreme heavy rainfall and drought events can cause severe agricultural, environmental, and socioeconomic losses and may pose a serious threat to human life. It is very valuable to address the extreme precipitation, identify the areas where floods and droughts may occur, and reveal their occurrence rules. All these efforts can provide priceless support for reasonable disaster mitigation measures and water resources management [6,7]
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