Spatiotemporal Changes in Precipitation Extremes over Canada and Their Teleconnections to Large-Scale Climate Patterns

AbstractIn the past few decades, there have been more extreme climate events occurring worldwide, including Canada, which has also suffered from many extreme precipitation events. In this paper, trend analysis, probability distribution function, principal component analysis, and wavelet analysis were used to investigate the spatial and temporal patterns of extreme precipitation events of Canada. Ten extreme precipitation indices were calculated using long-term daily precipitation data (1950-2012) from 164 Canadian gauging stations. Several large-scale climate patterns such as El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Pacific-North American (PNA), and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) were selected to analyze the relationships between extreme precipitation and climate indices. Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE), specific humidity, and surface temperature were employed to investigate potential causes of trends in extreme precipitation. The results reveal statistically ...