Climatology of persistent high relative humidity: An example for the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, USA

Abstract

The persistence of high values of relative humidity for several hours to a few days has wide-ranging implications for natural and human systems. Among its many impacts, persistent high relative humidity contributes to reduced atmospheric visibility, fog frequency and duration, road and powerline icing, the occurrence of foliar plant disease and the temperature at which heat-related morbidity and mortality can occur. Despite this, the characteristics of humidity spells-including shifts with climate change-are rarely investigated and consequently poorly understood. Hourly relative humidity, precipitation and temperature for 35 locations in the Lower Peninsula (LP) of Michigan during 2003-2017, and for seven locations during 1973-2017, were used to assess, by biweekly periods, spatial, intra-annual and inter-annual variations in the char

Trends in Quality Controlled Precipitation Indicators in the United States Midwest and Great Lakes Region

“…This is in contrast to most previous studies where precipitation indicators were calculated for annual time steps, with less attention paid to the seasonal variations in the precipitation indicators beyond the frequency of high intensity daily precipitation events (e.g., Mallakpour and Villarini, 2017). Given the importance of precipitation timing and sequencing for numerous regional applications, such as soil moisture and nitrogen movement in agricultural systems (Riha et al, 1996;Bowles et al, 2018) and plant disease risk (Komoto et al, 2021), this study extended the precipitation indicators to the seasonal time step. Additionally, the seasonal analyses provides greater context to more clearly interpret annual trends.…”