Abstract
Florida has a distinct wet season, which serves the annual water needs of the State and beyond. Our earlier studies have indicated that in addition to the seasonal rainfall anomalies, the variations of the length of the season also contribute significantly to variability of the wet season over Florida. Furthermore, the variations of the onset date of the rainy season relate significantly to the seasonal anomalies of length of the season and rainfall. In this study, we have used the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Mission version 6 (IMERG) rainfall dataset to monitor the rainy season over the five Water Management Districts (WMDs) of Florida for 2021. This effort was complimented by analyzing and verifying the variations of the rainy season over the preceding 20 wet seasons from the IMERG datasets. IMERG produces rainfall datasets at various latencies, with the final product having a 3.5-month latency since the satellite measurements of radiance are made. However, in this study, we find that an intermediate 12-h latency product of rainfall analysis from IMERG is reasonable to use for near real-time monitoring of the wet season over Florida. The operational monitoring of the 2021 wet season using the 12-h latency dataset from IMERG was also supplemented with the extended weather 6- to 10-day and 8- to 14-day forecasts of precipitation probability issued by the NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. Our study suggests that the current methodology of monitoring the onset date variations of the rainy season provides a viable alternative to assess and anticipate the seasonal variations amidst the moderate to insignificant weather and climate prediction skill of the numerical forecast models of the wet season of Florida.
Highlights
Florida is a unique geographical region of continental US with its peninsular structure and its placement in the tropical latitudes
The correlation values are far more comparable between the two datasets and in both instances are statistically significant at 95% confidence interval (Table 1), suggesting that the 12-h latency dataset of IMERG may be appropriate to diagnose the variations of the rainy season over SFWMD, albeit with some systematic bias correction
It is interesting to note that the diagnosis of the onset date of the rainy season is far more reliable in the 12h latency version of IMERG (Table 1)
Summary
Florida is a unique geographical region of continental US with its peninsular structure and its placement in the tropical latitudes. A unique aspect of the definition of the rainy season as introduced in Misra et al (2018a) is that the length of the season varies from year to year. Several studies have related the variability of the variations of the rainy season over PF across temporal scales to other climatic variations like El Niño and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Atlantic warm pool variations, and variations in the Loop Current (e.g., Misra and DiNapoli, 2012; Misra and Mishra, 2016; Misra et al, 2017a,b; Misra and Bhardwaj, 2020)
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