89th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting

Tuesday, 13 January 2009: 2:45 PM
Detecting the impacts of climate change on precipitation extremes for southern coastal Alaska
Room 126A (Phoenix Convention Center)
David H. Levinson, NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC, Asheville, NC; and M. C. Kruk
Poster PDF (185.5 kB)
This paper will specifically address the calculation of trends in extreme precipitation events for the Pacific coast region of Alaska. Our preliminary results suggest that the frequency of heavy precipitation events have increased across southern coastal Alaska, based on changes in the number of heavy rainfall events that have occurred in those stations with long-term records. We will demonstrate these observed changes through the analysis of trends in different climate change indices – the so-called “Frich” indices (Frich et al. 2002) – that illustrate observed increases in extreme precipitation episodes over seasonal and annual time scales. We will present these results and discuss climate change related trends in precipitation extremes using the daily and monthly precipitation indices.

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