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Abstract
Has the frequency of ‘extreme weather events’ changed with climate warming over the last century? Using hourly precipitation records from thirteen sites, this study finds no evidence for significant changes in mean ‘storminess’ across the United States. It is now widely accepted1,2,3,4,5 that the mean world climate has warmed since the beginning of climatologically significant anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases. Warming may be accompanied6,7,8 by changes in the rate of extreme weather events such as severe storms and drought. Here we use hourly precipitation data from 13 stations in the 48 contiguous United States to determine trends in the frequency of such events, taking the normalized variance and a renormalized fourth moment of the precipitation measurements, averaged over decades, as objective measures of the frequency and severity of extreme weather. Using data mostly from the period 1940–1999 but also two longer data series, periods that include the rapid warming that seems to have begun at approximately 1970, we find a significant increase of 6.5±1.3%(1σ) per decade in the normalized variance at a site on the Olympic Peninsula at which it is low. We place statistical limits on any trend at the remaining 12 sites, where the normalized variance and its uncertainty are larger. At most sites these limits are consistent with the same rate of linear increase as at the Olympic Peninsula site, but exclude the same rate of percentage increase.Cite this article
Muschinski, T., Katz, J. Trends in hourly rainfall statistics in the United States under a warming climate. Nature Clim Change 3, 577–580 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1828 