A spatial climatology of precipitation from North Atlantic tropical cyclones over the Eastern United States

Abstract:

The precipitation associated with tropical cyclones (TCs) over the eastern U.S has drawn significant attention from researchers. Among studies about tropical cyclone precipitation (TCP), separating rainfall into tropical and non-tropical cyclone components is a challenging task. Therefore, a need exists for continued spatial climatological analysis of rainfall associated of TCs. To provide a long-term climatology of TCP in this study, 305 TCs having tracks located within 500 km of the U.S. coastline from 1948-2012 are examined. The daily precipitation amounts on 0.25°× 0.25° latitude-longitude grids are from the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) Unified Precipitation Data (UPD). A GIS and Python based method is developed to identify rainfall swaths produced by TCs. Then we overlay all TCP swaths on a U.S. county map to get cumulative frequency of counties receiving rainfall from a TC with value greater than 25.4 mm. We find that there are 2533 counties in 25 states had been affected by TCP with value greater than 25.4 mm at least once during 1948 to 2012. The total area of TCP and TCP area averaged by annual TC counts and days shows significant increases after the 1990s. By comparing the rainfall swaths to the wind swaths as reported by previous work, we determine the frequency with which locations receive either condition produced by TCs. The results reveal that TCPs extend more inland and have more frequency than TC winds, since TC winds decays quickly after make landfall, while rainfall field may expand due to extra-tropical transition or land surface conditions.