When Will We Detect Changes in Short-Duration Precipitation Extremes?

Abstract

The question of when the influence of climate change on U.K. rainfall extremes may be detected is important from a planning perspective, providing a time scale for necessary climate change adaptation measures. Short-duration intense rainfall is responsible for flash flooding, and several studies have suggested an amplified response to warming for rainfall extremes on hourly and subhourly time scales. However, there are very few studies examining the detection of changes in subdaily rainfall. This is due to the high cost of very high-resolution (kilometer scale) climate models needed to capture hourly rainfall extremes and to a lack of sufficiently long, high-quality, subdaily observational records. Results using output from a 1.5-km climate model over the southern United Kingdom indicate that changes in 10-min and hourly precipitation emerge before changes in daily precipitation. In particular, model results suggest detection times for short-duration rainfall intensity in the 2040s in winter and the 2080s in summer, which are, respectively, 5–10 years and decades earlier than for daily extremes. Results from a new quality-controlled observational dataset of hourly rainfall over the United Kingdom do not show a similar difference between daily and hourly trends. Natural variability appears to dominate current observed trends (including an increase in the intensity of heavy summer rainfall over the last 30 years), with some suggestion of larger daily than hourly trends for recent decades. The expectation of the reverse, namely, larger trends for short-duration rainfall, as the signature of underlying climate change has potentially important implications for detection and attribution studies.