Space-time extremes of severe US thunderstorm environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Koh, Jonathan, Koch, Erwan, Davison, Anthony C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Koh, Jonathan
Koch, Erwan
Davison, Anthony C.
author_facet Koh, Jonathan
Koch, Erwan
Davison, Anthony C.
contents Severe thunderstorms cause substantial economic and human losses in the United States. Simultaneous high values of convective available potential energy (CAPE) and storm relative helicity (SRH) are favorable to severe weather, and both they and the composite variable $\mathrm{PROD}=\sqrt{\mathrm{CAPE}} \times \mathrm{SRH}$ can be used as indicators of severe thunderstorm activity. Their extremal spatial dependence exhibits temporal non-stationarity due to seasonality and large-scale atmospheric signals such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In order to investigate this, we introduce a space-time model based on a max-stable, Brown--Resnick, field whose range depends on ENSO and on time through a tensor product spline. We also propose a max-stability test based on empirical likelihood and the bootstrap. The marginal and dependence parameters must be estimated separately owing to the complexity of the model, and we develop a bootstrap-based model selection criterion that accounts for the marginal uncertainty when choosing the dependence model. In the case study, the out-sample performance of our model is good. We find that extremes of PROD, CAPE and SRH are generally more localized in summer and, in some regions, less localized during El Niño and La Niña events, and give meteorological interpretations of these phenomena.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2201_05102
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Space-time extremes of severe US thunderstorm environments
Koh, Jonathan
Koch, Erwan
Davison, Anthony C.
Applications
Methodology
Severe thunderstorms cause substantial economic and human losses in the United States. Simultaneous high values of convective available potential energy (CAPE) and storm relative helicity (SRH) are favorable to severe weather, and both they and the composite variable $\mathrm{PROD}=\sqrt{\mathrm{CAPE}} \times \mathrm{SRH}$ can be used as indicators of severe thunderstorm activity. Their extremal spatial dependence exhibits temporal non-stationarity due to seasonality and large-scale atmospheric signals such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In order to investigate this, we introduce a space-time model based on a max-stable, Brown--Resnick, field whose range depends on ENSO and on time through a tensor product spline. We also propose a max-stability test based on empirical likelihood and the bootstrap. The marginal and dependence parameters must be estimated separately owing to the complexity of the model, and we develop a bootstrap-based model selection criterion that accounts for the marginal uncertainty when choosing the dependence model. In the case study, the out-sample performance of our model is good. We find that extremes of PROD, CAPE and SRH are generally more localized in summer and, in some regions, less localized during El Niño and La Niña events, and give meteorological interpretations of these phenomena.
title Space-time extremes of severe US thunderstorm environments
topic Applications
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.05102