Historical trend of probable maximum precipitation in Utah and associated weather types

Abstract

This study assesses the impact global climate change has had on the theoretical upper limit of precipitation for Utah's watersheds by examining historical trends in probable maximum precipitation (PMP), a metric widely used for dam construction and management. Trends in the factors of PMP driven by both frontal and monsoonal storm scenarios were studied using two networks of surface weather stations and modern gridded datasets spanning 1981-2018.It was found that the historical trend in both 3-hr and 24-hr PMP estimations exhibited a statistically significant increasing trend, despite that the magnitude of the trend was sensitive to which dataset was examined and the data's spatial resolution. Over the 24-hr time scale, an interesting deviation in PMP trends was found where frontal storm events demonstrated increasing PMP trends compared to decreasing PMP trends for monsoonal storm events. However, both storm types demonstrated increasing trends over shorter 3-hr durations, suggesting a universal increase in convective storm intensity. PMP estimates also demonstrated a dependency on the type and resolution of meteorological data used, where higher-resolution data generally produced greater PMP values and weaker trends. A discussion on the potential causes of these dependencies is provided. This study implies the need to take the historical PMP trend into account for future PMP estimates, especially when coarse-resolution data are used for conventional PMP studies.