Abstract
Quantifying the magnitude and frequency of extreme precipitation events
is key in translating climate observations to planning and engineering
design. Past efforts have mostly focused on the estimation of daily
extremes using gauge observations. Recent development of high-resolution
global precipitation products, now allow estimation of global extremes.
This research aims to quantitatively characterize the spatiotemporal
behavior of precipitation extremes, by calculating extreme precipitation
return levels for multiple durations on the global domain using the
Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) dataset. Both
classical and novel extreme value distributions are used to provide an
insight into the spatial patterns of precipitation extremes. Our results
show that the traditional Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution
and Peak-Over-Threshold (POT) methods, which only use the largest events
to estimate precipitation extremes, are not spatially coherent. The
recently developed Metastatistical Extreme Value (MEV) distribution,
that includes all precipitation events, leads to smoother spatial
patterns of local extremes. While the GEV and POT methods predict a
consistent shift from heavy to thin tails with increasing duration, the
heaviness of the tail obtained with MEV was relatively unaffected by the
precipitation duration. The generated extreme precipitation return
levels and corresponding parameters are provided as the Global
Precipitation EXtremes (GPEX) dataset. These data can be useful for
studying the underlying physical processes causing the spatiotemporal
variations of the heaviness of extreme precipitation distributions.