Journal article
The efficacy of using gridded data to examine extreme rainfall characteristics: A case study for Australia
AD King, LV Alexander, MG Donat
International Journal of Climatology | WILEY | Published : 2013
DOI: 10.1002/joc.3588
Abstract
A 0.05° × 0.05° gridded dataset of daily observed rainfall is compared with high-quality station data at 119 sites across Australia for performance in capturing extreme rainfall characteristics. A range of statistics was calculated and analysed for a selection of extreme indices representing the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events, and their contribution to total rainfall. As is often found for interpolated data, we show that the gridded dataset tends to underestimate the intensity of extreme heavy rainfall events and the contribution of these events to total annual rainfall as well as overestimating the frequency and intensity of very low rainfall events. The interpolated datas..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
This study was supported by Australian Research Council grants CE110001028 and LP100200690. We thank the Bureau of Meteorology, the Bureau of Rural Sciences and CSIRO for providing the Australian Water Availability Project data. The station data used in this study was also provided by the Bureau of Meteorology. We are grateful to Blair Trewin and an anonymous reviewer whose suggestions helped to improve the quality of this article.