brry / prectemp Goto Github PK

Summer storms can bring large amounts of rain within an hour. The potential intensity increases with temperature, because warm air can contain more moisture than cold air. Unexpectedly, a drop of rain maxima is observed on very hot days.

We were able to show that the rainfall may be underestimated on those days because there are few observations available. I developed a software package that yields good estimates even for small data sets (available at github.com/brry/extremeStat).

The evaluation suggests that very high rainfall values may be possible but simply not yet measured. With regard to global and regional warming, this is an important finding e.g. for the planning of flash flood protective measures.

The paper resulting from our work is submitted and open for review at
www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci-discuss.net/nhess-2016-183

The code for the analysis and image generation is available with a DOI: