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Precipitation and synoptic weather types on hazardous weather days in the Southeastern US

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Abstract

As Earth’s climate warms, global precipitation regimes will change. How precipitation poses a hazard to human societies is a key factor in anticipating the consequences of this changing climate. The Southeastern US faces a unique variety of hydrometeorological hazards, including severe convective weather, floods, tropical cyclones, and winter storms. The purpose of this research is to identify the role of hazardous weather days (HWDs) in the precipitation regime of the Southeast and synoptic weather types associated with HWDs from 2009 to 2018. We use National Weather Service (NWS) warnings to identify HWDs, quantify the precipitation that falls on HWDs, and determine the synoptic weather type on HWDs using the Spatial Synoptic Classification (SSC) system. We find two geographic precipitation maxima on HWDs: one in the lower Mississippi Valley, and another in the Carolinas. We also find that the proportion of precipitation that falls on HWDs tends to be highest on Transition SSC days, associated with changing airmasses and frontal boundaries. However, stations in the lower Mississippi Valley (Carolinas) experience a relatively high amount of precipitation on Moist Moderate (Moist Tropical) days, and seasonally during spring (summer). Finally, we use principal component analysis to identify distinct regimes of precipitation on HWDs within the Southeast, such as the Ohio Valley, the Carolinas, and Florida. Results from this study can be paired with SSC trend analyses to anticipate changes in hydrometeorological hazards in the Southeast. Additionally, the distinct precipitation regimes within the study area may each experience differing effects in a changing climate.

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Data availability

Data can be found at https://github.com/dburow/SEUS_HWDs

Code availability

Code can be found at https://github.com/dburow/SEUS_HWDs

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Daniel Burow & Kelsey Ellis

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  1. Daniel Burow
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  2. Kelsey Ellis
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Contributions

Conceptualization: DB and KE. Investigation: DB. Data curation: DB. Original draft preparation: DB. Review and editing: DB and KE. Supervision: KE.

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Correspondence to Daniel Burow.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 2 Number of days that an NWS warning was issued for each hazard
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Table 3 Number of days of each non-dry SSC type and percentage that were HWDs
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Burow, D., Ellis, K. Precipitation and synoptic weather types on hazardous weather days in the Southeastern US. Theor Appl Climatol 146, 213–229 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03732-8

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