figure 14 from the paper
Figure 14 from the paper. CONUS NWS RFC regional thresholds for daily precipitation amounts recommended for future use by NWS in tracking QPF performance in high-impact extreme precipitation events. In each RFC region, the upper number is the threshold of the top 1% of precipitation events over the period from 1950-2007 in centimeters and the bottom number is in inches.
February 25, 2011

HMT Publication Notice

A journal article entitled Assessment of Extreme Quantitative Precipitation Forecasts and Development of Regional Extreme Event Thresholds Using Data from HMT-2006 and COOP Observers by Marty Ralph, Ellen Sukovich, Dave Reynolds, Mike Dettinger, Shawn Weagle, Wally Clark and Paul Neiman recently appeared in the December 2010 issue of the Journal of Hydrometeorology (Volume 11, pp. 1286-1304).

This paper uses observations and forecasts from the HMT-West 2005/06 field season to examine operational forecast skill in heavy rainfall events, as part of HMT's Quantitative Precipitation Forecasting (QPF) Major Activity Area. The research team included staff from NOAA/PSD, NWS forecast offices and USGS. The results highlight the challenge of predicting the location and magnitude of extreme rainfall, as well as differences between forecasts for the Pacific Northwest and California. It was also found that 16 of the 18 most extreme events were associated with atmospheric river conditions. Analysis of the regional distributions of nearly 30 million COOP observations of precipitation over >50 years over the contiguous U.S. led to a recommendation for a new method of measuring QPF performance based on objectively defined thresholds of extreme precipitation applicable to each of NWS, River Forecast Centers, domains (Figure).

 Read the Abstract

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