Increasing trends and changes in the frequency of Precipitation Extremes (PEx) have already been observed

Precipitation extremes are expected to intensify under climate change as ground temperature rises with a rate similar to the air’s water holding capacity ~7%/K (Clausius-Clapeyron). Recent studies have been inconclusive on the robustness and global consistency of this behavior. Here, we use hourly weather stations, 40 years of climate reanalysis and two convection permitting models to unravel the global pattern of rainfall extremes scaling with temperature at the hourly scale and identify hotspots of divergence from thermodynamical expectations. We show that in high- and mid-latitudes precipitation extremes closely follow a Clausius-Clapeyron scaling, while divergence occurs over the tropics and subtropics. Local features of atmospheric convection, larger-scale dynamics and orography, affect the dependence of extreme rainfall on surface temperature.

Rainfall is expected to change under a warmer climate (Allan et al., 2020;Fischer et al., 2013;Fischer & Knutti, 2016). At the global scale, projected changes in mean annual precipitation (Pendergrass et al., 2017;Zhang & Delworth, 2018) are most likely constrained by the surface energy budget at ∼3%/K (Allen & Ingram, 2002). Climate models also project changes in the seasonality (monthly rainfall climatology) of rainfall (

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