New hourly extreme precipitation regions and regional annual probability estimates for the UK

Many studies have quantified annual exceedance probabilities (or return periods) for UK extreme daily precipitation using fixed regions (e.g., HadUKP) and region of interest (ROI) (e.g., Flood Estimation Handbook) approaches, although fewer have evaluated short-duration events, which are important for flash flooding.

Existing UK extreme precipitation regions are based on daily datasets which have different characteristics compared to sub-daily extremes, and their application to quantify short-duration extremes may therefore be inappropriate. We use a recently available, quality-controlled hourly precipitation dataset for the UK from 1992 to 2014 to derive various extreme precipitation indices (e.g., annual maxima, 0.99 quantile) which are combined with additional climatological variables (e.g., temperature), geographical characteristics (e.g., latitude), and weather patterns (WPs) to characterize the UK hourly extreme precipitation climatology and to define five new hourly extreme regions.