Thursday March 27, 2025
University of Nevada, Reno —
For years, scientists have warned of heightened risks of extreme storms due to climate change, and those storms have already begun devastating communities.
Weather forecasting will play an increasingly important role in helping prepare communities for dangerous weather, but how are extreme snow and rain events forecasted? Research by professors Ania Panorska and Tom Kozubowski in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, along with colleagues from Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps), provides a new predictive model for extreme rain and snow events as well as the return periods (the average amount of time between events) and return levels (amount of precipitation) of extreme events. The study was published last month in Scientific Reports.
Previously, precipitation was predicted using hourly or daily models, which, for heavy precipitation events that last longer than a day, may not be particularly useful or accurate.
“Standard modeling techniques for extreme precipitation or storms use a fixed time frame (e.g. 5 days, 30 days, etc.) for analysis,” Panorska said. “However, duration of actual storms does not conform to these arbitrary timeframes.”