Monthly precipitation intensity maxima for 14 aggregation times at 132 stations in Germany

This dataset contains monthly precipitation intensity maxima for 14 aggregation times at 132 stations in Germany that serve as the basis of the study Modeling seasonal variations of extreme rainfall on different time scales in Germany.

Generation of the dataset:
We use precipitation measurements at 132 stations in Germany that provide a temporal resolution of one minute.  The majority (129) of these stations are operated by the  German Meteorological Service (DWD) and were obtained via ftp://ftp-cdc.dwd.de/climate_environment/CDC/observations_germany/climate. The available time series at these stations range from 19 to 28 years. Additionally we use three stations operated by the  Wupperverband (https://www.wupperverband.de) with time series of more than 43 years.

The observations were accumulated to the following durations: \(d \in 2^{\left\lbrace 0,1,2,..,13 \right\rbrace}\,\text{min} = \left\lbrace 1,2,4,...,8192 \right\rbrace\,\text{min}\). Thus, resulting in 14 time series per station.

Files and variables

meta_data_seasonal_variations_IDF_germany.csv

Meta information about the stations

Variables: station name, station id (as provided by DWD), position (longitude, latitude), length of timeseries available

Variable names: "StationName", "StationID", "Longitude", "Latitude", "NumberYears"

monthly_maxima_seasonal_variations_IDF_germany.csv

Monthly maxima for different durations (aggregation times)

Variables: station id (as in meta file), year and month of observation, duration [h], observed monthly intensity maximum [mm/h]

Variable names: "StationID", "Year", "Month", "Duration [h]", "MonthlyIntensityMaximum [mm/h]"

Abstract of the study

We model monthly precipitation maxima at 132 stations in Germany for a wide range of durations from one minute to about six days using a duration-dependent generalized extreme value (d-GEV) distribution with monthly varying parameters. This allows for the estimation of both monthly and annual intensity--duration--frequency (IDF) curves:
(1) The monthly IDF curves are steeper in summer and exhibit higher intensities for short durations than in the rest of the year. Thus, everywhere in Germany short convective extreme events occur very likely in summer. In contrast, extreme events with a duration of several hours up to about one day are more likely to occur within a longer period or even spread throughout the whole year, depending on the station. There are major differences within Germany with respect to the months in which long-lasting stratiform extreme events are more likely to occur. At some stations the IDF curves (for a given quantile) for different months intersect. The meteorological interpretation of this intersection is that the season at which a certain extreme event is most likely to occur shifts from summer towards autumn or winter for longer durations.
(2) We compare the annual IDF curves resulting from the monthly model with those estimated conventionally, that is, based on modeling annual maxima. We find that adding information in the form of smooth variations during the year leads to a considerable reduction of uncertainties. We additionally observe that at some stations, the annual IDF curves obtained by modeling monthly maxima deviate from the assumption of scale invariance, resulting in a flattening in the slope of the IDF curves for long durations.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Wupperverband, and in particular Marc Scheibel, as well as the Climate Data Center of the DWD, for providing and maintaining the precipitation time series.