Identification

Title

Space-time dependence of compound hot-dry events in the United States: assessment using a multi-site multi-variable weather generator

Abstract

Compound hot and dry events can lead to severe impacts whose severity may depend on their timescale and spatial extent. Despite their potential importance, the climatological characteristics of these joint events have received little attention regardless of growing interest in climate change impacts on compound events. Here, we ask how event timescale relates to (1) spatial patterns of compound hot-dry events in the United States, (2) the spatial extent of compound hot-dry events, and (3) the importance of temperature and precipitation as drivers of compound events. To study such rare spatial and multivariate events, we introduce a multi-site multivariable weather generator (PRSim.weather), which enables generation of a large number of spatial multivariate hot-dry events. We show that the stochastic model realistically simulates distributional and temporal autocorrelation characteristics of temperature and precipitation at single sites, dependencies between the two variables, spatial correlation patterns, and spatial heat and meteorological drought indicators and their co-occurrence probabilities. The results of our compound event analysis demonstrate that (1) the northwestern and southeastern United States are most susceptible to compound hot-dry events independent of timescale, and susceptibility decreases with increasing timescale; (2) the spatial extent and timescale of compound events are strongly related to sub-seasonal events (1-3 months) showing the largest spatial extents; and (3) the importance of temperature and precipitation as drivers of compound events varies with timescale, with temperature being most important at short and precipitation at seasonal timescales. We conclude that timescale is an important factor to be considered in compound event assessments and suggest that climate change impact assessments should consider several timescales instead of a single timescale when looking at future changes in compound event characteristics. The largest future changes may be expected for short compound events because of their strong relation to temperature.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d72n55p7

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-05-19T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact