Precipitating Fraction, Not Intensity, Explains Extreme Coarse-Grained Precipitation Clausius-Clapeyron Scaling With Sea Surface Temperature Over Tropical Oceans

Abstract

The sensitivity of coarse-grained daily extreme precipitation to sea surface temperature is analyzed using satellite precipitation estimates over the 300–302.5 K range. A theoretical scaling is proposed, linking changes in coarse-grained precipitation to changes in fine-scale hourly precipitation area fraction and changes in conditional fine-scale precipitation rates. The analysis reveals that the extreme coarse-grained precipitation scaling with temperature (∼7%/K) is dominated by the fine-scale precipitating fraction scaling (∼6.5%/K) when using a 3 mm/h fine-scale threshold to delineate the precipitating fraction. These results are shown to be robust to the selection of the precipitation product and to the percentile used to characterize the extreme. This new coarse-grained scaling is further related to the well-known scaling for fine-scale precipitation extremes, and suggests a compensation between thermodynamic and dynamic contributions or that both contributions are small with respect to that of fractional coverage. These results suggest that processes responsible for the changes in fractional coverage are to be accounted for to assess the sensitivity of coarse-grained extreme daily precipitation to surface temperature.