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Archive of past heavy precipitation events

Switch to a different threshold:

Select a year: 50 year, 6-hour recurrence interval

There were 58 six-hour periods when the rainfall exceeded the threshold in 2003!

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):

040712 040800 043006 050106 050400 050406 050612 050806 050812 051206 051506 051606 051706 051712 052300 052606 052800 060512 061506 061606 062106 062306 062312 062406 062506 062906
070212 070518 070606 071400 071612 071906 072018 072112 072118 072612 072800 073100 073106 080100 080200 080212 080400 081006 081300 081706 081906 083000 083012 083106 090112 090800
091106 091900 100918 101000 101206 121812

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.