https://gwf.usask.ca/projects-facilities/all-projects/p1-extreme-precipitation.php

Understanding of the physical processes affecting short‐duration (less than 24 hours) extreme precipitation and their possible changes in the warming world is important to the accurate projection of precipitation. However, most global and regional climate models do not directly simulate the processes that produce extreme precipitation due to their coarse resolutions and this hinders the proper interpretation of the precipitation projections produced by these models.

Such shortcomings can be addressed by making extensive use of a convection‐permitting modeling tool running in a pseudo‐global warming mode, and comparing it with existing simulations by global and regional climate models.

This project addresses the following four questions:
i) Does temperature scaling work at convective‐permitting resolutions for short‐duration local precipitation extremes?
ii) How will the characteristics of mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) such as the precipitation intensity, size, and life‐span of storms change in the future?
iii) What are the underlying physical processes that result in changes in MCSs and storm properties?
iv) How do extreme precipitation features scale across resolution from GCMs to RCMs to convective permitting WRF?

This project aims to increase our understanding of the physical soundness of future precipitation projections by climate models, thereby providing a scientific foundation for the proper use of model projections that many prediction models used by GWF depend on.