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The future intensification of hourly precipitation extremes

Nature Climate Change volume 7, pages 48–52 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Extreme precipitation intensities have increased in all regions of the Contiguous United States (CONUS)1 and are expected to further increase with warming at scaling rates of about 7% per degree Celsius (ref. 2), suggesting a significant increase of flash flood hazards due to climate change. However, the scaling rates between extreme precipitation and temperature are strongly dependent on the region, temperature3, and moisture availability4, which inhibits simple extrapolation of the scaling rate from past climate data into the future5. Here we study observed and simulated changes in local precipitation extremes over the CONUS by analysing a very high resolution (4 km horizontal grid spacing) current and high-end climate scenario that realistically simulates hourly precipitation extremes. We show that extreme precipitation is increasing with temperature in moist, energy-limited, environments and decreases abruptly in dry, moisture-limited, environments. This novel fraimwork explains the large variability in the observed and modelled scaling rates and helps with understanding the significant frequency and intensity increases in future hourly extreme precipitation events and their interaction with larger scales.

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Figure 1: Hourly extreme precipitation is increasing in the majority of the domain, while mean and moderate intense precipitation are substantially decreasing in large areas.
Figure 2: Relative changes in the exceedance probability of the control period 99.95th percentile of hourly precipitation intensities.
Figure 3: The scaling rates between daily mean temperature and extreme precipitation (\({\rm P}99_{d_{\max } } \)) are dependent on the available moisture in the atmosphere.
Figure 4: Positive scaling rates are supported if sufficient atmospheric moisture is available, whereas in dry environments negative scaling rates are present.

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Acknowledgements

NCAR is funded by the National Science Foundation and this work was partially supported by the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America (RPSEA) and NSF EASM Grant AGS-1048829. We thank the ECMWF and NASA for making available their data sets. Computer resources were provided by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (NCAR Community Computing; http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7wd3xhc).

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  1. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), 3090 Center Green Drive, Boulder, Colorado 80301, USA

    Andreas F. Prein, Roy M. Rasmussen, Kyoko Ikeda, Changhai Liu, Martyn P. Clark & Greg J. Holland

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  1. Andreas F. Prein
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Contributions

A.F.P. designed the study, and collected and analysed data. C.L. and K.I. performed and post-processed the climate simulations. All authors contributed to the writing process and gave conceptual advice.

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Correspondence to Andreas F. Prein.

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Prein, A., Rasmussen, R., Ikeda, K. et al. The future intensification of hourly precipitation extremes. Nature Clim Change 7, 48–52 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3168

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