Reconstruction and frequency estimates of extreme daily areal precipitation

Abstract

The analysis and modeling of extreme areal precipitation is carried out focusing the attention on extreme areal precipitation events rather than extreme point precipitation. The data is daily precipitation values from southern Norway. By investigating the spatial coverage of the fractional area (fraction of the considered catchment) where it rains over a certain intensity threshold, it was found, for a range of rain intensities, that the ratio between two fractional areas of consecutive thresholds is independent of the actual value of the rain intensity and the size of the considered catchment. The mean areal precipitation is seen as the sum of the fractional thresholded rainy areas for all intensity thresholds. By the properties of independence of the consecutive area ratios, it is possible to simulate fractional thresholded rainy areas, and thus compute the mean areal rainfall. The mean and the standard deviation of simulated series of extreme areal precipitation for five catchments of different size (from 48000 to 468 km2) are in very good agreement with those of the observed. This is also the case for the observed and simulated values of the fractional thresholded rainy areas. The mean values of the spatial coverage of thresholded areas for mesoscale convective complexes in the United States are found to be well modeled by the proposed method.