Changes to Sub-daily Rainfall Patterns in a Future Climate

This paper describes an algorithm for disaggregating daily rainfall into sub-daily rainfall ‘fragments’ (continuous fine-resolution rainfall sequences whose total depth sums to the daily rainfall amount) under a future, warmer climate. The basis of the algorithm is to re-sample sub-daily fragments from the historical record conditional on the total daily rainfall amount and a range of temperature-based atmospheric predictors representative of the future climate. The logic is that as the atmosphere warms, future rainfall patterns will be more reflective of historical rainfall patterns which occurred on warmer days at the same location, or at locations which have an atmospheric temperature profile more reflective of expected future conditions.