Are the Most Intense Convective Storms Also the Rainiest Storms, Part 2?

Abstract:

Using the TRMM Precipitation Radar profiles, Hamada et al. (2015) showed that there was a “weak linkage” between the most intense convection, proxied by the height of the 40 dBZ echo, and the maximum near-surface rain rate. That is to say, many of the most intense storms did not have extreme rain rates, compared with a subset of strong storms that had more moderate 40 dBZ echo tops, but had very heavy rainfall produced in large measure by warm rain processes in the lowest several kilometers.

We expand the database examined by that paper in two ways. One, instead of determining the maximum rainfall rate only on a 5 X 5 km pixel scale, we search through the TRMM database for significant areas covered by rainfall rates > 20 mm/h. Two, we expand the area of analysis to the higher latitudes covered by the GPM core satellite (65 N - 65 S), although we must accept the limitation that the first 18 months of data do not represent a true “climatology” of rare events.