Analysis of Extreme Summer Rainfall Using Climate Teleconnections and Typhoon Characteristics in South Korea

It is now widely acknowledged that climate variability modulates the frequency of extreme hydrological events. Traditional methodologies for hydrologic frequency analysis are not devised to account for variation in the exogenous teleconnections. Flood frequency analysis is further plagued by the assumptions of stationary in the causal structure as well as ergodicity. Here, we propose a dynamical hierarchical Bayesian analysis to account for exogenous forcing that govern the summer season rainfall. The precursors for Korean summer rainfall at different frequencies are identified utilizing wavelet and independent component analyses. The sea surface temperatures, the ensemble of rainfall predictions by General Circulation Model, in addition to the typhoon attributes were found to have direct correlation with extreme rainfall events and were used as inputs to the logistic regression model. The model parameters are estimated using Markov Chain Monte Carlo and the resulting posterior distributions associated with individual inputs are analyzed to advance our understanding of the spatiotemporal impact of the teleconnections. Eight rainfall stations throughout Korea are considered in this analysis. We demonstrate that the probability of occurrence of extreme events could be successfully projected at a 90% rate of correct classification of extreme events. (KEY TERMS: extreme summer rainfall; hierarchical Bayesian model; logistic regression; climate information.) Kwon, Hyun-Han, Abedalrazq F. Khalil, and Tobias Siegfried, 2008. Analysis of Extreme Summer Rainfall Using Climate Teleconnections and Typhoon Characteristics in South Korea. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 44(2):436-448. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2008.00173.x