Extreme rainfall archetypes for Australia

The concept of an archetype appears in areas relating to behavior, historical psychology, and literary analysis. Cutler and Breiman (1994) introduced archetypal analysis (AA), a data clustering method use to identify and differentiate between extreme configurations in point sets. Within the National Environmental Science Program (NESP), The Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub’s project, entitled Extreme Climate: Dry, Wet, Hot-and-Dry, we apply the AA methodology for the first time to Australia’s notoriously variable rainfall – allowing us to capture extreme rainfall patterns across the continent as a whole, together with assessments of when these patterns occur and how they relate to one another. This information serves as a new starting point for understanding key wet and dry events in Australia at the continent scale. This document should be used in conjunction with Extreme rainfall archetypes explainer currently in preparation and to be made available on the NESP The Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub website upon completion.