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Twenty-first century increases in total and extreme precipitation across the Northeastern USA

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Abstract

The northeastern USA has experienced a dramatic increase in total and extreme precipitation over the past 30 years, yet how precipitation will evolve across the Northeast by the end of the twenty-first century remains uncertain. To examine the future of precipitation across the Northeast, we use the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) regional climate model driven by the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Earth System Model (CESM) to simulate precipitation for historical (1976–2005) and future (2070–2099) periods. We compare precipitation from CESM-WRF hindcasts to gridded observations (Daymet), finding a 4.6% dry bias and 7.7% wet bias for total and extreme precipitation, respectively. CESM-WRF projections have increases in both total (9.7%) and extreme (51.6%) precipitation by the end of the twenty-first century, with winter having the largest increases in total precipitation (16.4%) and extreme precipitation (109.3%). These results are consistent with additional WRF simulations forced with the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model and the North American Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment archive. To investigate the drivers of precipitation change, we analyze several atmospheric variables and find that the projected increases in extreme precipitation are strongly related to increasing precipitable water over the eastern USA and the Atlantic Ocean. Understanding projected increases in total and extreme precipitation is critical for stakeholders to prepare for the impacts of intensified precipitation.

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Data availability

Daymet data are available at https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1328 and data from the NA-CORDEX archives are available at https://na-cordex.org/data.html.

Code availability

NCAR’s WRF model is freely available for download at https://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/download/get_source.html.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the WRF Help team and Dartmouth Research Computing for their support configuring and running the WRF simulations.

Funding

This work is funded by the Vermont Established Program for Stimulating Competitive Research (NSF Award OIA 1556770), the Kaminsky Undergraduate Research Award and the Paul K. Richter and Evalyn E. Cook Richter Memorial Fund from Dartmouth College.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Christopher J. Picard

  2. Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Jonathan M. Winter & Natalie G. Teale

  3. Department of Earth Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Charlotte Cockburn

  4. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Northern Vermont University-Lyndon, Lyndonville, VT, USA

    Janel Hanrahan

  5. Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

    Patrick J. Clemins & Brian Beckage

  6. Department of Plant Biology, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

    Brian Beckage

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  1. Christopher J. Picard
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Jonathan Winter and Christopher Picard designed the study and Christopher Picard conducted the analysis. All authors helped interpret results and contributed to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Christopher J. Picard.

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Picard, C.J., Winter, J.M., Cockburn, C. et al. Twenty-first century increases in total and extreme precipitation across the Northeastern USA. Climatic Change 176, 72 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03545-w

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