Global distribution of the intensity and frequency of hourly precipitation and their responses to ENSO

Abstract

We investigate the global distribution of hourly precipitation and its connections with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) using both satellite precipitation estimates and the global sub-daily rainfall gauge dataset. Despite limited moisture availability over continental surfaces, we find that the highest mean and extreme hourly precipitation intensity (HPI) values are mainly located over continents rather than over oceans, a feature that is not evident in daily or coarser resolution data. After decomposing the total precipitation into the product of the number of wet hours (NWH) and HPI, we find that ENSO modulates total precipitation mainly through the NWH, while its effects on HPI are more limited. The contrasting responses to ENSO in NWH and HPI is particularly apparent at the rising branches of the Pacific and Atlantic Walker Circulations, and is also notable over land-based gauges in Australia, Malaysia, the USA, Japan and Europe across the whole distribution of hourly precipitation (i.e. extreme, moderate and light precipitation). These results provide new insights into the global precipitation distribution and its response to ENSO forcing.

Consistent Large‐Scale Response of Hourly Extreme Precipitation to Temperature Variation Over Land

“…We obtained hourly precipitation data (PPT) from the GSDR data set (Lewis et al, 2019) which was compiled under the Global Water and Energy Exchanges (GEWEX) Hydroclimatology Panel INTENSE project (Blenkinsop et al, 2018) and has been used in many recent studies (Barbero et al, 2017(Barbero et al, , 2019a(Barbero et al, , 2019bGuerreiro et al, 2018;Li et al, 2020;Moron et al, 2019). The GSDR data has been quality-controlled using 25 different checks to identify and remove a range of errors, such as physical and spatial consistency issues, spikes and flat lines (streaks) (Blenkinsop et al, 2017;Lewis et al, 2018).…”

“…Studying changes to historical precipitation extremes can aid the understanding of potential future changes to extreme precipitation (Allen & Ingram, 2002). Previous studies have reported that climate warming and urbanization are intensifying observed daily precipitation extremes globally (Alexander, 2016; Ali et al., 2018; R. Barbero et al., 2017; Westra et al., 2014) with some evidence suggesting enhanced increases in observed extreme hourly precipitation intensities (Guerreiro et al., 2018; Li et al., 2020).…”

Anthropogenic intensification of short-duration rainfall extremes

“…Alongside this advance has been the development of new satellite retrieval methods for precipitation and regional-scale radar datasets. Together, these datasets have been used to quantify the effects of changes in temperature and humidity on precipitation extremes at different time-scales, links between the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall and large-scale circulation variability 29 and local changes to the spatial structure of intense storms 30 . However, despite this new understanding from observations of present-day climate, the degree to which these observed relationships will hold in a warming climate is still unclear.…”

Summer Mean and Extreme Precipitation Over the Mid‐Atlantic Region: Climatological Characteristics and Contributions From Different Precipitation Types

“…To analyze the sub‐daily extreme precipitation characteristics due to the <1‐day precipitation durations of most MCS/IDC events (Li et al., 2021), we also calculate the summertime top 1%/5% extreme hourly precipitation for each grid cell over the MAR by using a similar definition as that for extreme daily precipitation. Here, wet days/hours are days/hours with accumulated daily/hourly precipitation >0.01 mm (Layberry et al., 2006; X. Li et al., 2020; Piani et al., 2010). Since the minimum hourly precipitation from Stage IV is 0.04 mm h −1 (>0.01 mm) over the MAR in the summer of 2004–2017, all Stage IV precipitation data are used in the study.…”