The National Climatic Data Center has recently completed a multi-year effort to compile in-situ historical daily data on the global scale. The result is a data set with approximately 60,000 stations, several thousand of which have records in excess of 75 years. Daily precipitation time series are available at almost each of these stations. We use this data set to construct the climatology of "very heavy" precipitation events (e.g., those above 100 mm per day or those among the 1% of rainy days with the highest precipitation amount at each given station/season).

In regions where the data set contains an especially dense network of long-term stations, we were able to track the changes in "very heavy" precipitation during the past century. Among these regions are the United States, Mexico, South Africa, India, Australia, the former USSR, eastern Brazil and southern Canada. The pattern of these trends will be presented at the conference.