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Global land hotspots of clustered MCSs and their precipitation significance

Presentation Date
Friday, December 13, 2024 at 8:30am - Friday, December 13, 2024 at 12:20pm
Location
Convention Center - Hall B-C (Poster Hall)
Authors

Author

Abstract

Mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) can sometimes develop close to each other in time and space. Our previous work over the United States found that these clustered MCSs can collectively produce substantial amounts of precipitation over contiguous regions within a short time, resulting in severe flooding. The significant hydrologic and socioeconomic impacts of clustered MCSs motivates us to extend our prior analysis to other global regions. We first identify seven continental hotspots for clustered MCSs around the world: the central US, Amazon, Argentina, Sahel, Congo, India and Maritime Continents. Focusing on these seven land hotspots, we find that clustered MCSs are generally characterized by longer duration, larger precipitation area, and greater rain rate, each collectively contributing to significantly greater rainfall per unit area than during non-clustered MCS events. Precipitation in all seven regions show increasing contributions from clustered MCSs for more extreme events. Clustered MCSs in Argentina are responsible for the largest fraction of extreme precipitation of all of our study regions. The clustered MCSs that we identified, and their associated precipitation impacts, guide us to select extreme events over different continents for performing simulations to understand the moisture contribution from remote versus local sources to the extreme events for future works.

Category
Atmospheric Sciences
Funding Program Area(s)