Global co-occurring features and their contributions to total and extreme precipitation
Recently object-based trackers have been widely utilized for attributing global precipitation to specific atmospheric features. However, the same precipitation is often associated with multiple features. This study employs a systematic approach to examine feature co-occurrences and their relationships to mean and extreme precipitation. Four features are identified using existing datasets including atmospheric rivers (AR), mesoscale convective systems (MCS), low-pressure systems (LPS), and fronts (FT). Precipitation is often associated with multiple features, typically occurring where an atmospheric phenomenon meets the criteria for more than one feature-identifying algorithm. In the extra-tropics, over two-thirds of the total precipitation is co-occurring, with a considerable fraction related to AR-FT co-occurrences. In the tropics, about one-quarter of total precipitation comes from co-occurring features, with LPS-MCS co-occurrences contributing substantially in monsoon regions. For extremes (local precipitation exceeding the 95th percentile), AR-FT-MCS and FT-MCS co-occurrences contribute to extreme precipitation over both oceans (over 30%) and land (over 20%), respectively, in the extra-tropics. Co-occurring features involving MCSs show a larger contribution to high percentiles of rainfall intensity. A case study of a composite analysis suggests that the identified features and environmental factors derived from ERA-5 capture physics relevant to both the convective and frontal systems, which encourages further investigations on relationships between co-occurring features and their large-scale environments. The above results also emphasize the need for coordinated feature tracking when attributing precipitation to atmospheric phenomena.