On the temporal clustering of European extreme precipitation events and its relationship to persistent and transient large-scale atmospheric drivers

Abstract

Extreme precipitation events that occur in close succession can have important societal and economic repercussions. Here we use 42 years of reanalysis data (ERA-5) to investigate the link between Euro-Atlantic large-scale pattern of weather and climate variability and the temporal clustering of extreme rainfall events over Europe. We implicitly model the seasonal rate of extreme occurrences as part of a Poisson General Additive Model (GAM) using cyclic regression cubic splines. The smoothed seasonal rate of extreme rainfall occurrences is used to (i) infer the frequency of significant temporal clustering and (ii) implicitly serves as the baseline rate when modeling the effects of atmospheric drivers on extreme rainfall clustering. We use GAMs to model the association between the temporal clustering of extreme rainfall events and seven predominant year-round weather regimes in the Euro-Atlantic sector as well as a measure of synoptic-scale transient recurrent Rossby wave packets. Sub-seasonal clustering of precipitation events is significant at all grid-points over Europe; the proportion of extreme rainfall events that cluster in time ranges between 2% to 27%. The most relevant weather regime is the Atlantic Trough (corresponding to NAO+ with a southward shift of the jet) explaining most of the significant increase in clustering probability over Europe. The Greenland Blocking regime explains most of the clustering over the Iberian Peninsula. The Scandinavian Blocking regime is associated with a significant increase in clustering probability over the western Mediterranean, with a northwards shift in the signal to central Europe in summer.