Keynote: Weather regimes and extreme events: Extracting information from TRMM's 9-Year database

The Precipitation Feature (PF) Database is used to categorize individual rain events by location, time of day, season, size, rain volume, and convective intensity. These products are directly relevant to the desire to describe the role of precipitation in the climate system, with emphasis not only on mean rainfall, but on the small fraction of extreme events that account for a large impact on society. Put differently, as climate changes, we want to know what fraction of precipitation comes from intense events, and how that fraction is changing.

We address this question by using the TRMM PF database to describe extreme events in the climate of the past 9 years, using data from TRMM's Precipitation Radar, Microwave Imager, and Lightning Imaging Sensor. We recognize that the population and distribution of extremely rainy events is distinctly different from that of extremely intense convective events, and report on progress in characterizing the role of extreme events in our current climate.