Revisiting extreme precipitation amounts over southern South America and implications for the Patagonian Icefields

Sauter, Tobias

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2003-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2003-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2003-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 4

Research article

|

23 Apr 2020

Research article |

| 23 Apr 2020

Revisiting extreme precipitation amounts over southern South America and implications for the Patagonian Icefields

Tobias Sauter

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-2003-2020-supplement

Data sets

ERA-Interim data European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era-interim

Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) elevation data v4.1 NASA/CIGRA https://cgiarcsi.community/data/srtm-90m-digital-elevation-database-v4-1

Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administratoin (NOAA) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/weather-balloon/integrated-global-radiosonde-archive

Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administratoin (NOAA) http://www.remss.com/missions/ssmi

Short summary

Patagonia is thought to be one of the wettest – if not the wettest – places on Earth. The plausibility of these numbers has never been carefully scrutinized, despite the significance of this topic to our understanding of observed environmental changes, such as glacier recession. The revised precipitation values are significantly smaller than the previously reported values, thus opening up a new perspective on the Patagonian glaciers' response to climate change.