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Archive of past heavy precipitation events

Switch to a different threshold:

Select a year: 100 year, 6-hour recurrence interval

There were 60 six-hour periods when the rainfall exceeded the threshold in 2013!

Hover mouse over a date to see the map (dates are listed as two-digit month, then two-digit date, then two-digit hour so that 050112 indicates the period ending at 12 UTC on May 1st):

031906 031912 051100 051912 052512 052612 052706 053006 053112 060106 060112 060600 061306 061506 062012 062100 062106 062112 062212 062306 062412 062418 062606 062612 062706 062806
062906 070200 070506 070706 071100 071212 071306 071312 071506 071800 072012 072712 073006 080612 080712 080806 080812 081100 081512 082806 082818 083106 091212 091218 091918 092000
100312 101118 101318 101400 101406 103106 103112 103118

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.