Analysis of the Return Periods of Tropical Cyclone Rainfall events across temporal and spatial scales in the state of Florida (USA)

Extreme rainfall events have distinct spatio-temporal characteristics that are usually determined by climatic conditions and dominant weather types at the site of interest. When trying to simulate synthetic rainfall events, this spatio-temporal structure needs to be reproduced in order to achieve suitable design attributes (e.g. design of a drainage network, or flood protection at different spatial scales).

The study are of this analysis is the state of Florida, in the USA. Tropical Cyclone induced rainfall extremes tend to be more catastrophic in this region, therefore we focused only on historical TC events from the last 20 years. We analysed the rainfall Return Period composition at different temporal and spatial scales for observed gridded precipitation, and explored the consequences that these spatio-temporal characteristics have for design rainfall applications.