Tropical extreme precipitation and very long lived convective systems

Extreme precipitation theory has met great success in explaining the observational record and high resolution climate model simulations and prediction, in mid-latitudes environment. In the tropics, conventional observation based studies and idealized cloud resolving simulations however span a large diversity of responses. Recent satellite based observations of precipitation nevertheless show a robust support of the theory for the tropics. Our investigation of the relationship between precipitation extreme and mesoscale convective systems characteristics indicates that only a specific category of convective systems is involved in the extreme daily precipitation cases. The infrequent, very long lived systems explain an overwhelming part of the occurrence of the extremes of the daily tropical precipitation distribution. The consequence of these findings will be discussed at the conference.