Identification

Title

Near-global covariability of hourly precipitation in space and time

Abstract

A detailed analysis of hourly precipitation from 60 degrees N to 60 degrees S for the covariability is performed at 0.25 degrees resolution using the new CMORPH dataset. For all points, correlations are computed with surrounding points both concurrently and for various leads and lags up to a day. Results are more coherent over the oceans than land; the contours of constant correlation tend to be elliptical, oriented northeast-southwest in the northern extratropics and southeast-northwest in the southern extratropics. An ellipse is fitted to the correlation pattern, and major and minor axis vectors and eccentricity are mapped. Based upon both the isotropic correlations and ellipse, points are allocated to one of 20 clusters, and 16 are documented. Over the main extratropical ocean storm tracks, correlations exceed 0.8 for points 50 km distant and fall to about 0.3 at about 5 degrees radius. In the tropics values drop to 0.65 within 50 km and 0.2 at 5 degrees radius. Over land, values are lower in summer and drop to 0.1 at 5 degrees radius. Decorrelation e-folding distances range from less than 50 km over land to 200 km over extratropical ocean storm tracks. The movement of precipitation is compared with mean atmospheric winds. The lead-lag relationships indicate movement of systems but reveal the relatively short lifetimes of precipitation, of less than 12 h, even taking movement into account. The orientation of the ellipse reflects the structures of rain phenomena (fronts, etc.) rather than movement. These statistics demonstrate that daily averages fail to capture the essential character of precipitation.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7vq35f5

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

2018-04-01T00:00:00Z

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