Assessing Extreme Rainfall Characteristics in Future Climate for Canada
Alain Mailhot, Karine Guinard and Gérémy Panthou, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Eau-Terre-Environnement, Québec, QC, Canada
Contact First Author: Alain Mailhot; Alain.Mailhot@ete.inrs.ca
Previously Published Material: I was invited to this session and I decide to present some of our recent works on extreme precipitation. These have been published in the following papers:Guinard K., Mailhot A., Caya D. (2014). Projected changes in characteristics of precipitation spatial structures over North America. Available on line, Int. J. Climatol. DOI: 10.1002/joc.4006.Panthou G., Mailhot A., Laurence E., Talbot G. (2014). Relationship between surface temperature and rainfall intensities - A multi-timescale and event-based analysis. J. Hydrometeorology, 15(5):1999-2011. DOI: 10.1175/JHM-D-14-0020.1Mailhot A., Beauregard I., Talbot G., Caya D., Biner S. (2012). Future changes in intense precipitation over Canada assessed from multi-model NARCCAP ensemble simulations, Int. J. Climat., 32:1151-1163. DOI:10.1002/joc.2343.
English Abstract:
Hazards associated to extreme rainfalls can cause important damages to infrastructures. In order to correctly designed water infrastructures, it is therefore important to correctly assess extreme rainfall frequency and intensity in historical and future climates. Considering the vastness of the Canadian territory, characterizing extreme rainfalls has also been a challenged due to the low density of stations especially in the northern regions. Assessing extreme rainfall statistics is even complicated by the fact available rainfall series are relatively short and that some applications (e.g. in urban hydrology) require sub-daily rainfall series for which available series are even more rare. Available projections from regional climate models suggest that extreme rainfalls will be more frequent and intense in future climate. Even if these conclusions seem robust, large uncertainties remain because of the (still) coarse resolution of climate model and the impact of unresolved convection processes. This presentation will discuss of: 1) projected changes on Intensity-Duration-Frequency curves for extreme rainfalls over Canada based on simulations from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP); 2) projected changes in characteristics of precipitation spatial structures (defined as a contiguous area of precipitation above a given threshold) over North America; 3) relationships between surface temperature and extreme rainfalls. Forthcoming challenges related to the simulation of extreme rainfalls in future climate will be finally addressed.
