Abstract
Climate change leads to the increase of frequency and intensity for extreme precipitation events, potentially threatening the development of our society. It is of great significance to study the spatiotemporal variation of precipitation for understanding cycle process of water and its response to global warming. This paper selects the Xijiang River basin, which locates on a low latitude and coastland, as the research area. The spatiotemporal distribution and homogeneity of precipitation are analyzed, and the spatial trend is studied using 12 extreme precipitation indices. Finally, chaotic characteristics are evaluated for daily precipitation. The results showed that the precipitation in the basin tended to be unevenly distributed. On wet days, precipitation in the middle and the west was more and more uniform. The proportion of tiny rain was the largest, between 33.5% and 41.3%. The proportion of violent rain was the smallest, between 0.1% and 4.7%. Duan had the highest frequency for violent rain, and the probability of disasters caused by extreme precipitation near the station was the highest. The simple daily intensity index (SDII) showed a significant increase in the middle and the northeast. PRCPTOT (annual total wet-day precipitation) showed a decreasing trend in the northwest. The average rates of variation for R95PTOT (precipitation on very wet days) and R99PTOT (precipitation on extremely wet days) were −0.01 mm/year and 0.06 mm/year, respectively. There might be a risk of drought on the west of the basin in the future. Precipitation in other locations was still relatively abundant. Daily precipitation showed high dimension and high chaotic characteristics. The MED (minimum embedding dimension) was between 11 and 30, and the MLE (largest Lyapunov exponent) was between 0.037 and 0.144.
Highlights
The impact of extreme weather and climate change on economy, human life, ecosystem, industry, agriculture and the environment has become a major problem worldwide [1,2]
(b) The of daily precipitation events falling within classification interval every year
This paper studies the spatiotemporal variation and chaotic characteristics of precipitation across the Xijiang River Basin
Summary
The impact of extreme weather and climate change on economy, human life, ecosystem, industry, agriculture and the environment has become a major problem worldwide [1,2]. Water 2019, 11, 2106; doi:10.3390/w11102106 www.mdpi.com/journal/water (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) pointed out that many extreme events are changing with human influence in a number of regions, including a decrease in cold temperature extremes, an increase in warm temperature extremes, an increase in extreme high sea levels and an increase in the number of heavy precipitation events [3]. The anomaly of rainfall intensity, quantity and time has great potential to cause natural disasters, such as drought, floods and landslides [5,6,7]. The average rainfall was 174.7 mm, and caused a disaster were more than 900 villages were submerged. Understanding spatiotemporal patterns of precipitation is key to cognition of the complicated changes in the hydro-climatic system and the prediction of heavy precipitation [6,7,8,9,10]
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