Identification

Title

A spatial model to examine rainfall extremes in Colorado's Front Range

Abstract

Between 9th and 16th September 2013, northeast Colorado received some of its most extreme rainfall on record. The event affected 6 major rivers and their tributaries and 14 counties, breaking observed records for accumulations from sub-daily through to annual total. NOAA's rainfall atlases indicated that this event had an anticipated return period of 1000 years. We use the rainfall that led to the 2013 Colorado floods as a case study in order to explore how a large event can affect the generalized extreme value (GEV) parameter estimates often used by designers and planners. We employ daily rainfall observations, with at least 30 years of data, from stations across Colorado's Front Range of the Rocky Mountains to develop a spatial statistical model for annual maximum daily rainfall. We produce estimates of relatively rare events such as the 1% Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP) level and of extremely rare events such as the return period associated with Boulder's 2013 observation. To explore sensitivity, we compare estimates including and excluding data from 2013, and both using only individual station data and our model which borrows strength across multiple stations. We compute the uncertainty associated with all of our estimates, and find large uncertainties associated with extremely rare events. Our statistical model is a spatial hierarchical model and we employ a two-stage approach for inference which can be implemented by practitioners. Additionally, the spatial model allows us to interpolate spatially and estimate the GEV parameters at unobserved locations. A further development of the model makes use of an alternatively defined space in terms of elevation and a climate variable, rather than geographical space defined by longitude and latitude, which seems to better account for orographic effects. In addition to producing AEP level and return period estimates to the annual maximum data, we investigate sensitivity to the choice of block length. We find point estimates indicate the tail to be much heavier when a longer block length is used, but the uncertainty associated with this parameter is such that one cannot say the difference is significant. To describe the spatial extent of severe storms, we also investigate the amount of data dependence between station locations. We find evidence in the record for storms with large spatial extent, although an extremal dependence parameter estimate indicates that this dependence is relatively weak.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d71r6rzz

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2015-11-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact