Characteristics of rainfall events in regional climate model simulations for the Czech Republic

Abstract

Abstract. Characteristics of rainfall events in an ensemble of 23 regional climate model (RCM) simulations are evaluated against observed data in the Czech Republic for the period 1981-2000. Individual rainfall events are identified using the concept of minimum inter-event time (MIT) and only heavy events (15 % of events with the largest event depths) during the warm season (May-September) are considered. Inasmuch as an RCM grid box represents a spatial average, the effects of areal averaging of rainfall data on characteristics of events are investigated using the observed data. Rainfall events from the RCM simulations are then compared to those from the at-site and area-average observations. Simulated number of heavy events and seasonal total precipitation due to heavy events are on average represented relatively well despite the higher spatial variation compared to observations. RCM-simulated event depths are comparable to the area-average observations, while event durations are overestimated and other characteristics related to rainfall intensity are significantly underestimated. The differences between RCM-simulated and at-site observed rainfall event characteristics are in general dominated by the biases of the climate models rather than the areal-averaging effect. Most of the rainfall event characteristics in the majority of the RCM simulations show a similar altitude-dependence pattern as in the observed data. The number of heavy events and seasonal total precipitation due to heavy events increase with altitude, and this dependence is captured better by the RCM simulations with higher spatial resolution.

Assessment of Water Cycle Intensification Over Land using a Multisource Global Gridded Precipitation DataSet

“…In particular, we study the slopes of the 0.05-0.95 quantiles in steps of 0.05 (see Figure 1). This builds upon the results of Moberg et al (2006), who partitioned precipitation distribution in 2%, 5%, 10%, 90%, 95%, and 98% percentiles and calculated the corresponding trends, and Allan and Soden (2008), Rossow et al (2013), Svoboda et al (2016Svoboda et al ( , 2017 who considered discrete 5-10% quantile bins, in a comparison between observed data and model simulations.…”

Impacts of climate change on characteristics of daily‐scale rainfall events based on nine selected GCMs under four CMIP5 RCP scenarios in Qu River basin, east China

“…() and Svoboda et al . () pointed out that the second type of extreme rainfall events may induce more severe flood disasters due to the duration of the rainfall event. The characteristics of rainfall events under the second definition (hereafter rainfall event characteristics) have profound effects on the shape of the resulting hydrograph, soil moisture dynamics and water storage allocation (Jiang et al ., ).…”

“…Svoboda et al . () evaluated the ability of 23 regional climate models (RCM) in simulating characteristics of rainfall events such as rainfall depth, rainfall duration and rainfall mean intensity for the period 1981–2000. Most studies have been conducted based on historical data series.…”

Statistical downscaling to project extreme hourly precipitation over the United Kingdom

“…RCMs are also limited in the simulation of convective precipitation events (Maraun et al, 2010b;Svoboda et al, 2016), which is important for the representation of extreme hourly precipitation (Chan et al, 2013). As a consequence, large differences between RCM simulated and observed hourly precipitation extremes are found (Hanel and Buishand, 2010;Gregersen et al, 2013;Chan et al, 2014;Svoboda et al, 2017). In order to overcome the current limitations in terms of RCM precipitation projections, high resolution (1-5 km) RCMs have been tested (Ban et al, 2015;Prein et al, 2017).…”