Development of Regional Precipitation Frequency Grids to Supplement Atlas 14

With increased frequency in extreme precipitation events, changing patterns of land use, and rapid urbanization, Texas is becoming more vulnerable to flooding events. Proper planning is key to preserving lives and property, but sufficient tools are necessary to do so. Currently, NOAA’s Atlas 14 is the primary tool for this task, it currently uses a stationary approach that doesn’t account for trends in the data at the state level. It also does not provide projections of future changes in the rate of extreme precipitation events. To improve on this existing resource, the Office of the Texas State Climatologist is working to develop precipitation frequency grids which will incorporate historical precipitation data across Texas and analyze the trends in this data using climate model projections for future frequency estimates. In addition, this information would be available on a regional scale to provide better guidance to local areas. As student research assistants, our specific role in this project was to prepare and conduct trend analyses on several historical precipitation datasets and compare them to Atlas 14. This information will be vital to identifying specific shortcomings to Atlas 14 in order to better understand what tasks need to be done to produce the most effective frequency grids.