High return level estimates of daily ERA-5 precipitation in Europe estimated using regionalized extreme value distributions

Rivoire, Pauline; Le Gall, Philomène; Favre, Anne-Catherine; Naveau, Philippe; Martius, Olivia (2022). High return level estimates of daily ERA-5 precipitation in Europe estimated using regionalized extreme value distributions. Weather and climate extremes, 38, p. 100500. Elsevier 10.1016/j.wace.2022.100500

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Accurate estimation of daily rainfall return levels associated with large return periods is needed for a number of hydrological planning purposes, including protective infrastructure, dams, and retention basins. This is especially relevant at small spatial scales. The ERA-5 reanalysis product provides seasonal daily precipitation over Europe on a 0.25 grid (about 27 × 27 [km]). This translates more than 20,000 land grid points and leads to models with a large number of parameters when estimating return levels. To bypass this abundance of parameters, we build on the regional frequency analysis (RFA), a well-known strategy in statistical hydrology. This approach consists in identifying homogeneous regions, by gathering locations with similar distributions of extremes up to a normalizing factor and developing sparse regional models. In particular, we propose a step-by-step blueprint that leverages a recently developed and fast clustering algorithm to infer return level estimates over large spatial domains. This enables us to produce maps of return level estimates of ERA-5 reanalysis daily precipitation over continental Europe for various return periods and seasons. We discuss limitations and practical challenges and also provide a git hub repository. We show that a relatively parsimonious model with only a spatially varying scale parameter can compete well against statistical models of higher complexity.

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