Variations in sub-daily precipitation at centennial scale

Abstract

Due to data availability long-term variations in precipitation rates are mostly studied based on daily precipitation recordings. Recent research suggests, however, that variations in sub-daily precipitation are subject to higher dynamics compared to daily precipitation and a more rapid intensification is likely. Here we show that both observational data with at least 58 years of sub-daily precipitation records and a dynamical downscaling approach with low spatial resolution based on atmospheric re-analysis data confirm these expectations with consistent results. High percentiles of precipitation are subject to multi-decadal oscillations and increased during the last 150 years. We found an increase of 4% K−1 (daily), 12% K−1 (hourly), and 13% K−1 (10 min), which is consistent with Clausius–Clapeyron- (CC) and super CC-scaling, respectively. These findings highlight that dynamical downscaling can help to reliably shed light on sub-daily precipitation variations if small timescales are considered in the experiments.