Multi-day precipitation ranking for the Iberian Peninsula

What is it about?

A new objective method for ranking extreme precipitation episodes in different time scales over the Iberian Peninsula (IP) is presented. The sum of the normalized anomalies is computed over different time scales (2–10 days) to allow ranking the different anomalous precipitation multi-day periods. The magnitude of a precipitation episode is given taking into account the area (in percentage) that has precipitation anomalies above two standard deviations (std) and the mean values of these anomalies over this area. Different precipitation rankings are presented considering several domains.

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Why is it important?

This research is a generalization of the methods presented in Ramos et al. (2014). The different rankings revealed to be an useful tool for future studies in identifying the meteorological impacts of extreme precipitation episodes at the regional scale covering relatively large areas. Different rankings correctly detect and categorize the most extreme precipitation episodes which occurred on the various domains. For each domain, in general, results show that few events dominate the top ten of a particular ranking. When comparing the different domains, the top ten events are generally different from each other, thus highlighting the spatial variability of extreme precipitation. Moreover the methodology used to build the rankings imply that some events are considered extreme due to particularly high precipitation totals, while other episodes are more dependent on extensive areas affected by less extreme precipitation values.