Robust changes to the wettest and driest days of the year are hidden within annual rainfall projections: a New Zealand case study

Abstract

Understanding how the statistical properties of daily rainfall will respond to a warming climate requires ensembles of climate model data which are much larger than those typically available from existing centennial-scale modelling experiments. While such centennial-scale experiments are very useful to explore scenario uncertainty in twenty-first century climate, ensemble size constraints often result in regional climate change assessments restricting their focus to annual- or season-mean rainfall projections without providing robust information about changes to the most extreme events. Here, we make use of multi-thousand member ensembles of regional climate model output from the Weather@Home project to explicitly resolve how the wettest and driest days of the year over New Zealand will respond to simulations of a 3 °C world, relative to simulations of the climate of the recent past (2006–15). Using a novel framework to disentangle changes during the wettest and driest days of the year, we show that many regions which show negligible change in annual mean rainfall are in fact experiencing significant changes in the amount of rain falling during both the wettest and driest spells. Exploring these changes through the lens of drought risk, we find many agricultural regions in New Zealand will face significant changes in the frequency of low-rainfall extremes in a warmer world.