Abstract
AbstractExtreme precipitation often persists for multiple days with variable duration but has usually been examined at fixed duration. Here we show that considering extreme persistent precipitation by complete event with variable duration, rather than a fixed temporal period, is a necessary metric to account for the complexity of changing precipitation. Observed global mean annual‐maximum precipitation is significantly stronger (49.5%) for persistent extremes than daily extremes. However, both globally observed and modeled rates of relative increases are lower for persistent extremes compared to daily extremes, especially for Southern Hemisphere and large regions in the 0‐45°N latitude band. Climate models also show significant differences in the magnitude and partly even the sign of local mean changes between daily and persistent extremes in global warming projections. Changes in extreme precipitation therefore are more complex than previously reported, and extreme precipitation events with varying duration should be taken into account for future climate change assessments.
Highlights
The global hydrological cycle is expected to intensify with warming (Allen & Ingram, 2002), which will likely increase the intensity of daily extreme precipitation (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2013)
Global spatial patterns averaged over the 1961‐2010 period are similar between annual‐maximum precipitation of daily series (Rx1day) and annual‐maximum total precipitation of persistent precipitation events (RxEvent) but differ in magnitude at regional scales (Figure 1)
The observed high long‐term average of maximum precipitation (≥100 mm) occurs within 23.6% of grid boxes for RxEvent, which are obviously more than for Rx1day. These results indicate that separately considering 1‐day maximum precipitation extremes may affect risk assessments related to extreme precipitation events that persist for days
Summary
The global hydrological cycle is expected to intensify with warming (Allen & Ingram, 2002), which will likely increase the intensity of daily extreme precipitation (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2013). Observed globally averaged precipitation extremes show widespread statistically significant increasing trends (Alexander et al, 2006; Donat, Alexander, Yang, Durre, Vose, Dunn, et al, 2013), which are expected to continue into the future (Sillmann et al, 2013) Both observations and models agree that extreme daily precipitation increases at regional scales when averaged over either the wetter or the drier parts of land areas (Donat et al, 2016). These contributions provide a unique and long‐term (1961‐2010) observational data set covering most of the global land area, except for large parts of Africa (see section 2 for details) This comprehensive data set is expected to allow an improved understanding of changing extreme daily and persistent precipitation events. We analyze the annual‐maximum precipitation amounts associated with daily and persistent precipitation events (see section 2 for details)
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