A Rainfall Disaggregation Scheme for Generating Fine Time-scale Extreme
Rainfall under Climate Change
Abstract
Extreme rainfall can be calamitous to the ecosystem, life, society, and
economy through rapidly developing (flash) floods and is likely to
intensify in a warmer future climate. Such intensification is however
less well understood for the rainfall in short durations (e.g., hourly;
1h) due to the coarse time-scale of climate models. This study proposes
an artificial neural network (ANN) model for disaggregating coarser
time-scale (i.e., 3h) rainfall datasets to finer time-scale (i.e., 1h)
extreme rainfall (i.e., annual maximum series (AMS)), targeting a
data-scarce county like Cambodia by using the 1h rainfall dataset and
multiple meteorological covariates datasets (e.g., temperature, wind
velocity, and surface latent & sensible heat flux (SLHF&SSLF))
provided by ERA5 reanalysis products. The ANN model was trained by using
the information of extreme rainfall events extracted from this 1h
rainfall dataset and of the associated simultaneous weather conditions
signified by specific combinations of these meteorological covariates.
The rationale is that future extreme rainfall patterns will resemble the
historical extreme rainfall patterns if similar weather conditions exist
during the extreme rainfall events. Covariate importance analysis shows
that the most important covariates for the disaggregation are SLHF&SSLF
and wind velocity. The proposed ANN model reproduced the observed 1h AMS
satisfactorily, with R2 of 0.93 and mean absolute percentage error
(MAPE) of 6.1%, averaged for the study area. This ANN model is flexible
enough to be extended to other time scales (e.g., daily to sub-hourly)
and can be used for similar studies globally. Future work will consider
more meteorological covariates, which can be both provided by the ERA5
reanalysis products and climate models, as the predictors.