6.11. VERY HEAVY PRECIPITATION OVER LAND: ESTIMATES BASED ON A NEW GLOBAL DAILY PRECIPITATION DATA SET

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 % (or even 0.3%) of rainy days with the highest precipitation amount at each given station/season).* An approach employed includes the assessment of “very heavy ” precipitation events in statistical terms as estimates of regional frequencies of these rare events. Therefore, in order to reliably estimate these frequencies we restricted ourselves to regions where the data set contains an especially dense network of long-term stations. There we were able to track the changes in “very heavy ” precipitation for most of the past century. Among these regions are the contiguous Unite