Abstract
In August 2016, northern Japan was stuck by apparently unusual occurrence of the landfall of four typhoons and experienced record-breaking heavy precipitations. This study analyzed the extreme precipitations carried out by these four typhoons to understand their internal structure over northern Japan by computing the probability distributions of precipitation durations with their peak intensities exceeding a range of percentile thresholds starting from 70 to 99%. The main focus was on the duration and size of the extreme precipitations together with the precipitation structure over northern Japan during the passage of each of these four typhoons through different latitudinal locations. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the long-lasting and widespread extreme precipitations carried by individual typhoon and such information are crucial for prevention of and protection from typhoon-related hazards over Japan. We find that the typhoons landfalled over Hokkaido region exhibit similar characteristics of precipitation duration, while the typhoon landfalled over Tohoku region shows relatively long-lived precipitation durations. However, all the four typhoons show a robust feature in the precipitation sizes over northern Japan. The occurrence of heavy precipitations with intensity higher than 20–30 mm h−1 is more frequent and last 6 to 9 h over northern Japan. These features may explain the excessive precipitations caused by each typhoon. The important information contained in this study is the duration and size of the precipitations induced by the typhoons vary depending on the landfalling region. However, the precipitation characteristics associated with all the three typhoons landfalled over Hokkaido show mostly robust features. This study gives a first step towards a description of the spatio-temporal characteristics of typhoon-induced precipitations and has an overall implication towards the future research that is needed for the assessment of typhoon-induced precipitation-related disasters in future warming climate.
Highlights
Tropical cyclones (TCs) are gigantic, destructive, and deadly disaster-spawning weather phenomena that bring very heavy precipitations and widespread flooding to coastal regions
The 99th percentile of all the four typhoons correspond to 20–30 mm h−1 precipitation intensity, while the 99.99th value of Typhoon Lionrock (T1610) corresponds to 72 mm h−1, and those of other three typhoons correspond to 40–60 mm h−1
For Typhoon Mindulle (T1609), the heavy precipitations with intensity exceeding 99th percentile continued up to 6 h, while those with intensities higher than 95th percentiles are long-lived and lasted more than 18 h. These results indicate that the typhoons landfalling over Hokkaido region show almost same precipitation duration characteristics compared to the precipitation durations of the typhoon landfalled over Tohoku region
Summary
Tropical cyclones (TCs) are gigantic, destructive, and deadly disaster-spawning weather phenomena that bring very heavy precipitations and widespread flooding to coastal regions. A large number of typhoons form over the western North Pacific region, and some of them became highly destructive, for example, Typhoon Vera (1959), Typhoon Mireille (1991), Typhoon Songda (2004), Typhoon Haiyan (2013), Typhoon Jebi (2018), and Typhoon Hagibis (2019) and caused severe and widespread damages by extreme precipitations (Oku et al 2010; Mori et al 2014; Mori and Takemi 2016; Takemi et al 2016a, 2016b; Ito et al 2016; Kanada et al 2017; Takemi 2018; Takemi et al 2019; Takemi 2019; Takemi and Ito 2020; Takemi and Unuma 2020) Such extreme typhoons strongly cause flash floods, landslides, and mudslides over large areas in a short period of time (Emanuel 2005; IPCC 2013, 2014; Takemi et al 2016c; Guan et al 2018). To understand the severity of such disastrous events, studies are limited to get the information about the internal temporal-spatial precipitation structure in individual typhoons and the duration and size of the precipitation within the typhoons
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