Abstract
Estimates of future precipitation regimes on small watersheds and daily time scales are frequently required in hydrologic analyses. Such estimates must be based on projections from coarse resolution global climate models combined with analyses of current observational data. Possible combination methods are reviewed. One approach is to link historical precipitation records to observed and modelled atmospheric circulation patterns. This requires knowledge of the spatial scale of daily precipitation. A method of establishing this scale as a function of location, season, and topography is developed and linked to circulation patterns. The method relates the conditional probabilities of precipitation occurrence at station pairs to their inter-station distance. It was tested for mid-latitude continental interior and coastal conditions, Colorado and North Carolina, USA respectively. Separate analyses were undertaken for summer and winter and for mountainous and flat regions. A logarithmic relationship between inter-station correlation and distance was established. Storms in Colorado were less frequent and smaller than in North Carolina, while for the latter state winter storms were significantly larger than summer ones. Mountainous regions tended to have more widespread storms than did flat areas. The spatial scale varied little with circulation in Colorado but meridional flow over North Carolina led to more frequent and localized storms than did zonal flow, especially in winter. Thus this simple method allows specification of the impact of circulation changes on the scale of precipitation, and hence some indications of possible consequences of climate change.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Robinson, P.J. (1996). The Influence of Topography, Season and Circulation on Spatial Patterns of Daily Precipitation. In: Jones, J.A.A., Liu, C., Woo, MK., Kung, HT. (eds) Regional Hydrological Response to Climate Change. The GeoJournal Library, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5676-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5676-9_8
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