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Fine-scale characteristics of hourly intense rainfall in pre-summer and post-summer rainy seasons in Guangdong Province over coastal South China

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Abstract

Based on the hourly rainfall data from 86 national-level meteorological observation stations in Guangdong Province over coastal South China during 2000–2019, this study emphatically investigates the fine-scale characteristics of hourly intense rainfall (HIR) events, defined as greater than 20 mm/h, for the pre-summer and post-summer rainy seasons separately. Results show pronounced spatiotemporal characteristics of HIR events in rainy seasons, with similar maximum value regions as annual-mean rainfall. In particular, the HIR events occur most frequently in the Yangjiang area of western Guangdong, urban areas of Pearl River Delta, and the Shanwei area of eastern Guangdong in the pre-summer rainy season, while HIR events occur most frequently in the Leizhou Peninsula, Yangjiang region of western Guangdong and Haifeng-Jiexi regions of eastern Guangdong in the post-summer rainy season. Furthermore, there exist significant diurnal variation differences in the frequencies and rainfall amounts of HIR events between the pre-summer and post-summer rainy seasons. Two peaks appear in the pre-summer rainy season for the averaged diurnal variation of HIR events and show great differences in different HIR high-frequent regions. However, only one peak occurs in the post-summer rainy season, which mainly concentrates on the periods of afternoon hours with relative consistencies in different HIR high-frequent regions. The occurrence time of the diurnal maximum in HIR events frequency in the pre-summer rainy season presents a quadrupole spatial distribution from north to south, with the periods of the afternoon-to-evening, before dawn-to-morning, afternoon-to-evening, and before dawn-to-morning, respectively, while it has a banding distribution from coast to inland in the post-summer rainy season, with the near coastline occurring in before dawn and the inland in evening hours. These findings give a deeper understanding of the rainfall characteristics in Guangdong and can help to improve disaster prevention and mitigation capabilities.

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Data availability

The hourly rainfall data from 86 national-level meteorological observation stations in Guangdong Province are obtained from the Climate Center of Guangdong Meteorological Bureau of China (http://gd.cma.gov.cn/).

Code availability

All codes used in this study are available from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

We thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions, which helped to improve the paper.

Funding

This study is supported jointly by the National Key Research and Development Program (Grant No.2018YFC1507602), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42175039, 42205051), and Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (Grant No. 2020A1515010485).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangzhou Institute of Tropical and Marine Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration, Guangzhou, 510080, China

    Ru** Huang & Weiyu Ding

  2. Center for Monsoon System Research, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bei**g, 100190, China

    Shangfeng Chen, Wen Chen & Peng Hu

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  1. Ru** Huang
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Contributions

S.F. Chen and R.P. Huang designed the research. R.P. Huang performed the analysis and wrote the original manuscript. S. F. Chen, W. Ding, W. Chen, and P. Hu commented and revised the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shangfeng Chen.

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Huang, R., Chen, S., Ding, W. et al. Fine-scale characteristics of hourly intense rainfall in pre-summer and post-summer rainy seasons in Guangdong Province over coastal South China. Theor Appl Climatol 150, 1083–1095 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04215-0

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