Characteristics of warm season precipitating storms in the Arkansas–Red River basin

Abstract

[1] Analysis of a multisensor precipitation product enables us to extract the precipitation from individual storms in the Arkansas–Red River drainage basin over a period of 11 years. We examine the year-to-year and intraseasonal variations of storm numbers, duration, sizes, and precipitation in the data set. Intraseasonal variations in numbers of storms exceed their year-to-year variations. More mountainous regions had greater numbers of storms than flatter regions. Most storms are small, last less than 2 h, and produce modest amounts of precipitation. The maximum size of storms and the number of storms are negatively correlated on a yearly basis. Midsummer months had a greater percentage of smaller storms but the storms were of longer average duration. We can roughly divide the storms into three different types, single ordinary cell storms, multiple storms (includes supercells), and mesoscale convective systems, and look at their year to year and intraseasonal variability in the data set. The most storms occur around 1700 local time but the most precipitation falls around 0100 local time. Storm duration was the most important factor determining how much precipitation storms generate per cell. We do not find that drought years or years with abundant precipitation had any particular characteristics but occur as a result of simultaneous occurrence of several features.