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Global co-occurring features and their contributions to total and extreme precipitation

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Abstract

Recently object-based trackers have been widely utilized for attributing global precipitation to specific atmospheric features. However, the same precipitation is often associated with multiple features. This study employs a systematic approach to examine feature co-occurrences and their relationships to mean and extreme precipitation. Four features are identified using existing datasets including atmospheric rivers (AR), mesoscale convective systems (MCS), low-pressure systems (LPS), and fronts (FT). Precipitation is often associated with multiple features, typically occurring where an atmospheric phenomenon meets the criteria for more than one feature-identifying algorithm. In the extra-tropics, over two-thirds of the total precipitation is co-occurring, with a considerable fraction related to AR-FT co-occurrences. In the tropics, about one-quarter of total precipitation comes from co-occurring features, with LPS-MCS co-occurrences contributing substantially in monsoon regions. For extremes (local precipitation exceeding the 95th percentile), AR-FT-MCS and FT-MCS co-occurrences contribute to extreme precipitation over both oceans (over 30%) and land (over 20%), respectively, in the extra-tropics. Co-occurring features involving MCSs show a larger contribution to high percentiles of rainfall intensity. A case study of a composite analysis suggests that the identified features and environmental factors derived from ERA-5 capture physics relevant to both the convective and frontal systems, which encourages further investigations on relationships between co-occurring features and their large-scale environments. The above results also emphasize the need for coordinated feature tracking when attributing precipitation to atmospheric phenomena.

Category
Extremes Events
Water Cycle and Hydroclimate
Funding Program Area(s)
Additional Resources:
NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center)