A climate model-informed nonstationary stochastic rainfall generator for
design flood analyses in continental-scale river basins
Abstract
Existing stochastic rainfall generators (SRGs) are typically limited to
relatively small domains due to spatial stationarity assumptions,
hindering their usefulness for flood studies in large basins. This study
proposes StormLab, an SRG that simulates precipitation events at 6-hour
and 0.03° resolution in the Mississippi River Basin (MRB). The model
focuses on winter and spring storms caused by strong water vapor
transport from the Gulf of Mexico—the key flood-generating storm type
in the basin. The model generates anisotropic spatiotemporal noise
fields that replicate local precipitation structures from observed data.
The noise is transformed into precipitation through parametric
distributions conditioned on large-scale atmospheric fields from a
climate model, reflecting both spatial and temporal nonstationarity.
StormLab can produce multiple realizations that reflect the uncertainty
in fine-scale precipitation arising from a specific large-scale
atmospheric environment. Model parameters were fitted for each month
from December-May, based on storms identified from 1979-2021 ERA5
reanalysis data and AORC precipitation. Validation showed good
consistency in key storm characteristics between StormLab simulations
and AORC data. StormLab then generated 1,000 synthetic years of
precipitation events based on 10 CESM2 ensemble simulations. Empirical
return levels of simulated annual maxima agreed well with AORC data and
displayed bounded tail behavior. To our knowledge, this is the first SRG
simulating nonstationary, anisotropic high-resolution precipitation over
continental-scale river basins, demonstrating the value of conditioning
such stochastic models on large-scale atmospheric variables. The
simulated events provide a wide range of extreme precipitation scenarios
that can be further used for design floods in the MRB.