Exploring spatial and temporal dependencies of rainfall extremes to enable adaptation in The Netherlands delta
In Space2rain we investigate changes in summertime convective precipitation extremes at different temporal and spatial scales. In previous research it has been found that hourly extremes could increase at a rate of 14 % per degree dew point temperature change — so increases in hourly extremes could increase twice as fast as the increase in near surface humidity as governed by the Clausius-Clapeyron (CC) relation. It is generally thought that this 2CC scaling is caused by positive feedbacks from the convective cloud dynamics. Changes in cloud dynamics are likely to have an effect on the size of convective clouds and their ability to cluster into large convective cloud system. This is investigated in Space2rain by using rain radar observations and simulations of convective clouds using Large Eddy Simulation models.
