A novel method to identify sub-seasonal clustering episodes of extreme precipitation events and their contributions to large accumulation periods

Abstract

Temporal (serial) clustering of extreme precipitation events on sub-seasonal timescales is a type of compound event. It can cause large precipitation accumulations and lead to floods. We present a novel, count-based procedure to identify episodes of sub-seasonal clustering of extreme precipitation. We introduce two metrics to characterise the prevalence of sub-seasonal clustering episodes and their contribution to large precipitation accumulations. The procedure does not require the investigated variable (here precipitation) to satisfy any specific statistical properties. Applying this procedure to daily precipitation from the ERA5 reanalysis data set, we identify regions where sub-seasonal clustering occurs frequently and contributes substantially to large precipitation accumulations. The regions are the east and northeast of the Asian continent (northeast of China, North and South Korea, Siberia and east of Mongolia), central Canada and south of California, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, and the north of Argentina and south of Bolivia. Our method is robust with respect to the parameters used to define the extreme events (the percentile threshold and the run length) and the length of the sub-seasonal time window (here 2–4 weeks). This procedure could also be used to identify temporal clustering of other variables (e.g. heat waves) and can be applied on different timescales (sub-seasonal to decadal). The code is available at the listed GitHub repository.