Event Detection and Spatial Analysis for Characterizing Extreme Precipitation

Atmospheric Rivers (ARs) are large spatially coherent weather systems with high concentrations of elevated water vapor that often cause severe downpours and flooding over western coastal United States. With the availability of more atmospheric moisture in the future under global warming, we expect ARs to play an important role as a potential cause of extreme precipitation. We have recently developed TECA software for automatically identifying and tracking features in climate datasets. In particular, we are able to identify ARs that make landfall on the western coast of North America. This detection tool examines integrated water vapor field above a certain threshold and performs geometric analysis. Based on the detection procedure, we investigate impacts of ARs by exploring spatial extent of AR precipitation for CMIP5 simulations, and characterize spatial pattern of dependence for future projections under climate change within the framework of extreme value theory. The results show that AR events in RCP8.5 scenario (2076-2100) tend to produce heavier rainfall with higher frequency and longer duration than the events from historical run (1981-2005). Range of spatial dependence between extreme precipitations is concentrated on smaller localized area in California under the highest emission scenario than present day. Preliminary results are illustrated in Figure 1 and 2. Fig 1: Boxplot of annual max precipitation (left two) and max AR precipitation (right two) from GFDL-ESM2M during 25-year time period by station in California, US.

Fig 2: Spatial dependence of max AR precipitation calculated from Station 4 (triangle) for historical run (left) and for future projections of RCP8.5 (right) from GFDL-ESM2M. Green and orange colors represent complete dependence and independence between two stations respectively.