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Archive of past heavy precipitation events

Switch to a different threshold:

Select a year: 50 year, 24-hour recurrence interval

There were 44 dates where the rainfall exceeded the threshold in 2008!

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):

0319 0331 0510 0523 0524 0603 0604 0605 0606 0607 0608 0613 0614 0625 0703 0707 0711 0718 0719 0723 0724 0725 0727 0731 0803 0805 0812 0819 0820 0821 0822 0824 0827 0828 0902 0903 0906 0907
0911 0912 0913 0914 0925 1007

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.