Tropical Cyclonic Rainfall in China: Changing Properties, Seasonality, and Causes

Abstract

Using daily rainfall data from 1936 stations across China, this study investigated tropical cyclonic rainfall (TCR) changes during 1960–2014. The possible reasons behind TCR changes were examined using tracks and frequency of tropical cyclones (TCs) in both space and time. The highest annual TCR occur in coastal regions of east and southeast China (>500 mm/year). At monthly scale, August TCR can reach 150–250 mm in coastal regions. From the contribution viewpoint, TCR accounts for more than 40% of the monthly total rainfall and extreme rainfall events along the southeast coast of China. The contributions of TCR to the monthly rainfall amount decrease rapidly from coast to inland and are even faster for contributions of TCR to extreme rainfall. The distance inland from the shoreline with 250 km has been identified as the threshold, within that these contributions abruptly increase with decreasing distance from shoreline, and vice versa. In terms of extreme rainfall regimes, logistic and Poisson regressive techniques were used to identify the connections between TC‐induced extreme rainfall and El Niño–Southern Oscillation. Both these two regressions reveal that TC‐induced extreme rainfall tends to occur with higher frequency and magnitude in southeastern China (east and northeast coast of China) during La Niña (El Niño) years (El Niño). These consistent relations and remarkable spatial patterns can help to predict the occurrence of TC‐induced extreme rainfall events across eastern China.

Greater flood risks in response to slowdown of tropical cyclones over the coast of China

“…The study area is defined as the landside area within 200 km from the coastline of mainland China, because the contribution of a TC to rainfall decreases sharply as the distance from coastline increases. When the distance exceeds 200 km, the contribution drops below 10% (32,33). Best-track data covering the western North Pacific during 1961-2017 are taken from the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) archive (34).…”

Potential contributions of climate change and urbanization to precipitation trends across China at national, regional and local scales

“…Recently, Chen and Sun (2017) pointed out that human-induced warming has increased daily precipitation extremes by approximately 13%. In southeastern China, there is a large percentage of precipitation extremes can be attributed to tropical cyclones (Gu et al, 2017b;Zhang et al, 2018a;2018b). Additionally, precipitation changes are more strongly influenced by the monsoon circulation (Wang and Ding, 2006), and their relationships are also modulated by SST anomalies (Chan and Zhou, 2005).…”

“…Precipitation observations from 2,474 stations across China were collected from the China Meteorological Information Center (e.g., Ma et al ., ; Zhang et al ., ; ). A total of 1,857 stations with coverage of 1961–2014 and less than 5% missing values were selected (Figure ).…”

“…Precipitation is influenced by many factors, such as tropical cyclones (Gu et al, 2017b;Zhang et al, 2018a;2018b), topography (Zhang et al, 2014) and land surface conditions (urbanization, soil moisture, etc.) (Liu et al, 2014a;2014b;Yang et al, 2017).…”

Observed rainfall asymmetry of tropical cyclone in the process of making landfall in Guangdong, south China

“…TCs often bring about extreme rainfall. A large portion of extreme rainfall is contributed by TCs along coastal areas (Khouakhi et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2017;Rios Gaona et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2018). Chang et al (2012) found that 50-70% of extreme rainfall along the southeastern coast of China was associated with TCs.…”