TY - JOUR
T1 - Exploring the Future of Rainfall Extremes Over CONUS
T2 - The Effects of High Emission Climate Change Trajectories on the Intensity and Frequency of Rare Precipitation Events
AU - Emmanouil, Stergios
AU - Langousis, Andreas
AU - Nikolopoulos, Efthymios I.
AU - Anagnostou, Emmanouil N.
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors. Earth's Future published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union.
PY - 2023/4
Y1 - 2023/4
N2 - The impacts of climate change on extreme rainfall characteristics at fine spatiotemporal scales are governed by substantial uncertainty, primarily due to the systematic error components inherited from conventional numerical prediction systems, and/or the intrinsic assumptions of the selected modeling schemes. Here, we attempt to robustly evaluate the effects of future climate scenarios on intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves over the entire Contiguous United States, while accounting for the nonstationary nature of the rainfall process across adequately fine spatiotemporal resolutions. To do so, we apply a parametric approach to statistically downscaled climate model outputs that reflect the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, which are offered by the North American Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment. Compared to traditional IDF estimation techniques, the employed framework is based on multifractal (MF) scaling arguments and assumes that the statistical structure of rainfall at interannual scales can be approximated by sequential realizations of a stationary MF process with parameters that vary slowly across (not within) realizations. The obtained results show that return period estimates exhibit significant downward trends over most of the domain, which slowly dampen with time, as the effects of climate change are more pronounced at lower exceedance probability levels. Given the observed rate of changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall for the remainder of the century, we argue that future infrastructure design should be strategically tailored to account for a wide range of potential outcomes.
AB - The impacts of climate change on extreme rainfall characteristics at fine spatiotemporal scales are governed by substantial uncertainty, primarily due to the systematic error components inherited from conventional numerical prediction systems, and/or the intrinsic assumptions of the selected modeling schemes. Here, we attempt to robustly evaluate the effects of future climate scenarios on intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves over the entire Contiguous United States, while accounting for the nonstationary nature of the rainfall process across adequately fine spatiotemporal resolutions. To do so, we apply a parametric approach to statistically downscaled climate model outputs that reflect the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, which are offered by the North American Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment. Compared to traditional IDF estimation techniques, the employed framework is based on multifractal (MF) scaling arguments and assumes that the statistical structure of rainfall at interannual scales can be approximated by sequential realizations of a stationary MF process with parameters that vary slowly across (not within) realizations. The obtained results show that return period estimates exhibit significant downward trends over most of the domain, which slowly dampen with time, as the effects of climate change are more pronounced at lower exceedance probability levels. Given the observed rate of changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall for the remainder of the century, we argue that future infrastructure design should be strategically tailored to account for a wide range of potential outcomes.
KW - climate change
KW - extreme rainfall
KW - intensity-duration-frequency curves
KW - multifractals
KW - nonstationary approach
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U2 - 10.1029/2022EF003039
DO - 10.1029/2022EF003039
M3 - Article
SN - 2328-4277
VL - 11
JO - Earth's Future
JF - Earth's Future
IS - 4
M1 - e2022EF003039
ER -