Multiscale precipitation extremes are determined by rain event
morphology in very deep convective systems
Abstract
The spatiotemporal scale used to calculate extreme precipitation
intensities can introduce strong biases when investigating their
physical origin, impacts, and sensitivity to climate. Besides, the
contribution of Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCSs) to tropical
precipitation extremes remains loosely quantified on various scales, in
particular on kilometer scales.
Here we analyze the co-occurrence of extreme precipitation at convective
and mesoscale levels to compare their properties in terms of
precipitation morphology and regional predominance. Using a storm
tracking algorithm, we contrast the occurrence and rain statistics for
various types of convective systems across ten global storm-resolving
models and one geostationary satellite product.
We find a large statistical independence between rain extremes on these
two scales, as they occur in distinct regions.
Heavy km-scale events occur mostly over continents, over margins of
convective zones, 40\% of which are produced by MCSs in
observations. Their intensity is independent from the area of rain
features.
Conversely, heavy mesoscale rain intensities scale with the area of rain
features, occur more frequently over oceans and a third of these events
are produced by MCSs. More generally, a continuum between these extremes
emerges from the wider variety of convective systems, quantified here as
deep, very-deep and mesoscale convective systems.
Compared to observations, models consistently underestimate the
precipitating surface and show high variability in the contribution of
convective systems to precipitation extremes at each scale. This
diagnostic can serve as an evaluation criterion for the ability of GSRMs
to represent how individual convective systems produce realistic heavy
rain distributions.