Xihui Gu, Qiang Zhang, Vijay P. Singh, Lin Liu, Peijun Shi
[Xihui Gu]. Department of Water Resources and Environment, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China;
[Qiang Zhang, Peijun Shi]. Key Laboratory of Environmental Changes and Natural Hazards, Ministry of Education, Beijing Normal University, China.
[Qiang Zhang, Peijun Shi]. State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, China.
[Qiang Zhang, Peijun Shi]. Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management, Beijing Normal University, China.
[Vijay P. Singh]. Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering & Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA.
[Lin Liu]. Department of Geography, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0131.
Abstract: Statistical properties of annual and seasonal daily maximum precipitation in terms of nonstationarity, upper tail properties and impact of tropical cyclones (TCs) were analyzed, using data from 728 meteorological stations across China and TCs tracks data covering a period of 1951-2014. The change points and trends detected by stepwise regression method and the modified Mann-Kendall statistic, respectively, provided limited evidence of the violation of the stationarity assumption in both annual and seasonal extreme precipitation, and the presence of a possible climate change signal could not be inferred conclusively. For stationary stations, the ratio of scale parameter to location parameter of the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution was exponential for annual and seasonal extreme precipitation in some sub-regions. On the other hand, annual and seasonal maxima point to an unbounded-above and heavy-tail behavior, and these upper tail properties in light of the mixtures of different rainfall-generating mechanisms was not considered. The anomalous values of the GEV shape parameter were associated with TCs in controlling the upper tail of annual maxima in China’s coastal areas with strong spatial heterogeneities.
Published in International Journal of Climatology, DOI: 10.1002/joc.4969.
