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Archive of past heavy precipitation events

Switch to a different threshold:

Select a year: 100 year, 24-hour recurrence interval

There were 39 dates where the rainfall exceeded the threshold in 2002!

Hover mouse over a date to see the map (dates are listed as two-digit month followed by two-digit date, so that 0501 indicates May 1st):

0428 0524 0529 0603 0604 0605 0609 0610 0613 0614 0622 0623 0625 0627 0701 0702 0703 0706 0707 0708 0710 0712 0729 0802 0807 0821 0822 0827 0828 0829 0830 0831 0906 0909 0915 0922 0927 1019
1121

Data sources and notes:
Gridded recurrence interval data were provided by The Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment Tool website.
That is based on data in Hershfield, D. M., 1961: Rainfall frequency atlas of the United States. U.S. Weather Bureau Technical Paper 40, 115 pp.
Precipitation data is the Stage IV analysis over the US, obtained in real-time from NOAA/NCEP.
Archived precipitation data come from NCAR/EOL.
The Stage IV analysis data have been coarsened slightly for this analysis, to a grid with approximately 8.25-km horizontal spacing. We have found that this helps to eliminate the identification of spurious events, although it may also remove legitimate events that occurred at very small spatial scales.
Currently, the analysis has only been conducted for states east of the Rockies, but we hope to extend it to the full US (using updated recurrence interval information where available) in the future.
Maps of events exceeding the 1-hour precipitation thresholds are not yet available, but we hope to post them soon.

Acknowledgments:
Stephanie Stevenson (undergraduate researcher at Texas A&M University) created the archived images (for the years 2002--2010) and performed most of the data analysis.
This work was published in Stevenson and Schumacher (2014, Monthly Weather Review). Please cite this paper if you make use of the data or analyses from this website in your own research.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. AGS-0954908 and AGS-1157425. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.