Spatial clustering of heavy clustering in ERA-5 precipitation over Europe}

Extreme precipitation often cause floods and lead to important societal and economical damages. Rainfall is subject to local orography features and their intensities can be highly variable. In this context, identifying climatically coherent regions for extremes is paramount to understand and analyze rainfall at the correct spatial scale. We assume that the region of interest can be partitioned into homogeneous regions. In other words, sub-regions with common marginal distribution except a scale factor. As an example, considering extremes as block maxima or excesses over a threshold, a sub-region corresponds to a constant shape parameter. We develop a non-parametric clustering algorithm based on a ratio of Probability Weighted Moments to identify these homogeneous regions and gather weather stations. By construction this ratio does not depend on the location and scale parameters for the Generalized Extreme Value and Generalized Pareto distributions. Our method has the advantage to only rely on raw precipitation data and not on station covariates.

A simulation data study is performed based on the extended GPD distribution that appears to well capture low, moderate and heavy rainfall intensities. Sensitivity to the number of clusters is analyzed. Results of simulation reveal that the method detects homogeneous regions. We apply our clustering algorithm on ERA-5 precipitation over Europe. We obtain coherent homogeneous regions consistent with local orography. The marginal precipitation behaviour is analyzed through regional fitting of an extended GPD.