Sensitivity of extreme precipitation to temperature: the variability of scaling factors from a regional to local perspective

Schroeer, Katharina; Kirchengast, Gottfried

doi:10.1007/s00382-017-3857-9

Cited by 91 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Now we use sub‐daily data to better understand the processes underlying the mutual causality of precipitation extremes and dew point temperature over shorter timescales. Hourly precipitation extremes are generally more sensitive to day‐to‐day dew point temperature variations (Drobinski et al, ; Schroeer and Kirchengast, ) and are expected to intensify at a faster rate than daily extremes in a warmer climate (Prein et al, ). We found that >91% of 1‐h rainfall extremes in Darwin (defined as >95th percentile of wet hours) were embedded within short‐duration (<12 h) storms.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temperature‐extreme precipitation scaling: a two‐way causality?

Barbero

Westra

Lenderink

et al. 2017

Intl Journal of Climatology

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Extreme precipitation events are widely thought to intensify in a warmer atmosphere through the Clausius‐Clapeyron equation. The temperature‐extreme precipitation scaling was proposed to analyse the temperature dependency of short‐duration extreme precipitation and since then, the concept has been widely used in climatology. Bao et al. (2017) suggest that the apparent scaling reflects not only how surface air properties affect extreme precipitation, but also reflects how synoptic conditions and localized cooling due to the storm itself affect the scaling – implying two‐way causality. We address here critical issues of this paper and provide evidence that dew point temperature drives extreme precipitation, with the direction of causality reversed only for the storm's peak intensity. This physical inference may serve as a basis to better quantify scaling rates and to help establish the relationship between extreme precipitation and environmental conditions in the current climate, and thereby provide insights into future changes to precipitation extremes due to climate change.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temperature‐extreme precipitation scaling: a two‐way causality?

Barbero

Westra

Lenderink

et al. 2017

Intl Journal of Climatology

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“…The increased water-holding capacity of warmer air, as governed by the Clausius-Clapeyron (C-C) relation (Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008;O'Gorman and Schneider, 2009;Sharma, 2015, 2017), intensifies heavy rainfall at a rate of approximately 7-8 % • C −1 of warming. On a local scale, for sub-hourly and up to 6-hourly extreme precipitation, increases at or above the C-C rate have been found in the Netherlands (Lenderink and van Meijgaard, 2008;Lenderink et al, 2017), Switzerland (Ban et al, 2014), Germany (Berg et al, 2013), the UK (Blenkinsop et al, 2015), the Mediterranean (Drobinski et al, 2016), most of Australia Sharma, 2015, 2017;Schroeer and Kirchengast, 2017), North America (Shaw et al, 2011), and China (Miao et al, 2016), while in India (Ali and Mishra, 2017) and northern Australia (Hardwick Jones et al, 2010) negative rates have been reported. The extent of urbanization also contributes to extreme regional precipitation through the urban heat island effect and aerosol concentration (Dixon and Mote, 2003;Mölders and Olson, 2004;Guo et al, 2006;Mohsen and Gough, 2012;Wang et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does nonstationarity in rainfall require nonstationary intensity–duration–frequency curves?

Ganguli

Coulibaly

2017

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. In Canada, risk of flooding due to heavy rainfall has risen in recent decades; the most notable recent examples include the July 2013 storm in the Greater Toronto region and the May 2017 flood of the Toronto Islands. We investigate nonstationarity and trends in the short-duration precipitation extremes in selected urbanized locations in Southern Ontario, Canada, and evaluate the potential of nonstationary intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves, which form an input to civil infrastructural design. Despite apparent signals of nonstationarity in precipitation extremes in all locations, the stationary vs. nonstationary models do not exhibit any significant differences in the design storm intensity, especially for short recurrence intervals (up to 10 years). The signatures of nonstationarity in rainfall extremes do not necessarily imply the use of nonstationary IDFs for design considerations. When comparing the proposed IDFs with current design standards, for return periods (10 years or less) typical for urban drainage design, current design standards require an update of up to 7 %, whereas for longer recurrence intervals (50-100 years), ideal for critical civil infrastructural design, updates ranging between ∼ 2 and 44 % are suggested. We further emphasize that the above findings need re-evaluation in the light of climate change projections since the intensity and frequency of extreme precipitation are expected to intensify due to global warming.

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“…Annual frequencies of weather types do not show significant changes over the study period, except for a slight increase in frequency of WT1B days (0.65 days per year, 90% confidence level). Extreme convective precipitation intensities are highly sensitive to temperature in southeastern Austria (Schroeer & Kirchengast, ) and are generally expected to increase with global warming (Zhang, Zwiers, Li, Wan, & Cannon, ). Although trends in sub‐daily extreme precipitation cannot be robustly detected at this point, this means that both the frequency of convective days and the intensity of precipitation on these days could increase in the future.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Agreement among data products is high on the daily scale, but correlations decrease towards sub‐hourly observations due to the high variability on small spatio‐temporal scales and storm movement. Furthermore, sub‐daily extremes and small‐scale phenomena are not well represented in gridded precipitation datasets (Hiebl & Frei, ; Schroeer, Kirchengast & O, ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying damage contributions from convective and stratiform weather types: How well do precipitation and discharge data indicate the risk?

Schroeer

Tye

2018

J Flood Risk Management

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Convective precipitation is intensifying in many regions, but potential implications of shifts in precipitation types on impacts have not been quantified. Furthermore, risk assessments often focus on rare extremes, but also more frequent hydro‐meteorological events burden private and public budgets. Here synoptic, hydrological, meteorological, and socio‐economic data are merged to analyse 25 years of damage claims in 480 Austrian municipalities. Exceedance probabilities of discharge and precipitation associated with damage reports are calculated and compared for convective and stratiform weather patterns. During April to November, 60% of claims are reported under convective conditions. Irrespective of the weather type, most of the accumulated cost links to minor hazard levels, not only indicating that frequent events are a highly relevant expense factor, but also pointing to deficiencies in observational data. High uncertainty in damage costs attributable to extreme events demonstrates the questionable reliability of calculating low‐frequency event return levels. Significant differences exist among weather types. Stratiform weather types are up to 10 times more often associated with damaging extreme discharge or precipitation, while convective weather shows the highest nuisance level contributions. The results show that changes in convective precipitation are pertinent to risk management as convective weather types have contributed significantly to damage in the past.

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Sensitivity of extreme precipitation to temperature: the variability of scaling factors from a regional to local perspective

Abstract: interpretation of the intent and setting of the study. When this is considered, conditional scaling factors can help to better understand which influences control the intensification of rainfall with temperature on a regional scale.

Cited by 91 publications

References 51 publications

Temperature‐extreme precipitation scaling: a two‐way causality?

Temperature‐extreme precipitation scaling: a two‐way causality?

Does nonstationarity in rainfall require nonstationary intensity–duration–frequency curves?

Quantifying damage contributions from convective and stratiform weather types: How well do precipitation and discharge data indicate the risk?

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