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Contrasting response of rainfall extremes to increase in surface air and dewpoint temperatures at urban locations in India.

ABSTRACT: Rainfall extremes are projected to increase under the warming climate. The Clausius-Clapeyron (C-C) relationship provides a physical basis to understand the sensitivity of rainfall extremes in response to warming, however, relationships between rainfall extremes and air temperature over tropical regions remain uncertain. Here, using station based observations and remotely sensed rainfall, we show that at a majority of urban locations, rainfall extremes show a negative scaling relationship against surface air temperature (SAT) in India. The negative relationship between rainfall extremes and SAT in India can be attributed to cooling (SAT) due to the monsoon season rain events in India, suggesting that SAT alone is not a good predictor of rainfall extremes in India. In contrast, a strong (higher than C-C rate) positive relationship between rainfall extremes and dew point (DPT) and tropospheric temperature (T850) is shown for most of the stations, which was previously unexplored. Subsequently, DPT and T850 were used as covariates for non-stationary daily design storms. Higher magnitude design storms were obtained under the assumption of a non-stationary climate. The contrasting relationship between rainfall extremes with SAT and DPT has implications for understanding the changes in rainfall extremes in India under the projected climate.

SUBMITTER: Ali H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5430704 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Contrasting response of rainfall extremes to increase in surface air and dewpoint temperatures at urban locations in India.

Ali Haider H Mishra Vimal V

Scientific reports 20170427 1

Rainfall extremes are projected to increase under the warming climate. The Clausius-Clapeyron (C-C) relationship provides a physical basis to understand the sensitivity of rainfall extremes in response to warming, however, relationships between rainfall extremes and air temperature over tropical regions remain uncertain. Here, using station based observations and remotely sensed rainfall, we show that at a majority of urban locations, rainfall extremes show a negative scaling relationship agains ...[more]

PMID: 28450745

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Project description:[1] This study attempts to reconcile the conflicting results reported in the literature concerning the behavior of peak-over-threshold (POT) daily rainfall extremes and their distribution. By using two worldwide data sets, the impact of threshold selection and record length on the upper tail behavior of POT observations is investigated. The rainfall process is studied within the framework of generalized Pareto (GP) exceedances according to the classical extreme value theory (EVT), with particular attention paid to the study of the GP shape parameter, which controls the heaviness of the upper tail of the GP distribution. A twofold effect is recognized. First, as the threshold decreases, and nonextreme values are progressively incorporated in the POT samples, the variance of the GP shape parameter reduces and the mean converges to positive values denoting a tendency to heavy tail behavior. Simultaneously, the EVT asymptotic hypotheses are less and less realistic, and the GP asymptote tends to be replaced by the Weibull penultimate asymptote whose upper tail is exponential but apparently heavy. Second, for a fixed high threshold, the variance of the GP shape parameter reduces as the record length (number of years) increases, and the mean values tend to be positive, thus denoting again the prevalence of heavy tail behavior. In both cases, i.e., threshold selection and record length effect, the heaviness of the tail may be ascribed to mechanisms such as the blend of extreme and nonextreme values, and fluctuations of the parent distributions. It is shown how these results provide a link between previous studies and pave the way for more comprehensive analyses which merge empirical, theoretical, and operational points of view. This study also provides several ancillary results, such as a set of formulae to correct the bias of the GP shape parameter estimates due to short record lengths accounting for uncertainty, thus avoiding systematic underestimation of extremes which results from the analysis of short time series. Citation: Serinaldi, F., and C. G. Kilsby (2014), Rainfall extremes: Toward reconciliation after the battle of distributions, Water Resour. Res., 50, 336-352, doi:10.1002/2013WR014211.

Dataset Information

Contrasting response of rainfall extremes to increase in surface air and dewpoint temperatures at urban locations in India.

Publications

Contrasting response of rainfall extremes to increase in surface air and dewpoint temperatures at urban locations in India.

Similar Datasets

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