Investigating the Impacts of Anthropogenic Warming on Extreme Precipitation Events Over Kansas City

Abstract:

The winter storm Ulmer in spring of 2019 caused devastating weather events including massive flooding of the Missouri River basin and an estimated $3 Billion in damages throughout the Midwest. More evidences show there is a connection between the anthropogenic warming and the intensity and frequency of extreme precipitation and flooding events. Having a greater understanding of how these extreme storm events will change corresponding to the anticipated anthropogenic warming will allow for better preparations of what will come in the future for local farmers and city planners. In this study, we use the high-resolution regional Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to first simulate the precipitation induced by the storm Ulmer in the Kansas City metropolitan area and the larger surrounding rural regions with horizontal resolutions of 1-km and 3-km separately. The North America Regional Reanalysis (NARR) data was used to drive the model. The modeled precipitation was compared with the in-situ measurements and spatially distributed Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) data for validation. A series of WRF sensitivity simulations were designed to evaluate the impacts of a handful of various potential climate change scenarios (e.g., cooling, warming, wetter, and dryer) on the extreme precipitation events. Our results are further compared to the theoretical sensitivity of precipitation to temperature, e.g., the estimate of an increase of ~7% precipitation for every degree Kelvin (K) increase of temperature according to the Clausius Clapeyron (CC) equation. This study is expected to shed light on the changes of extreme weather events within the scope of large-scale greenhouse-gas induced global warming. Another perspective of regional- and local-scale anthropogenic impacts due to human-induced land use and land cover change, e.g., urbanization will be also discussed.