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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Eleonora Dallan, Professor Hayley Fowler
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2026 The Author(s). Water Resources Research published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. Characterizing storms that generate heavy precipitation across different timescales is essential for parameterizing and assessing stochastic weather generators, evaluating climate models, enhancing risk management, and understanding climate change impacts. This study develops a detailed climatology of precipitation and temperature time series for storms producing heavy rainfall at sub-hourly to daily scales across the Greater Alpine Region. Using a high-resolution data set from ∼400 climate stations with 15–44 years of records for which a storm typology is available, we identify independent storm events and describe them through multiple characteristics, including peak intensity, lifetime, depth, temporal structure, internal variability, and thermal and geographical attributes. At each climate station, we focus on storms producing the largest 10% of the precipitation intensities at durations from 10 min to 24 hr. Results show that storm characteristics vary systematically with both duration and geography. At sub-hourly scales, the highest intensities are typically generated by short-lived storms with front-loaded temporal profiles, high internal variability, and warmer conditions, especially in lowland regions, and exhibit evident reverse elevation-intensity relationship. At daily scales, the highest intensities are associated with storms of greater depth, more symmetric temporal profiles, and smaller pre-to-within-storm temperature differences, particularly in the inner Alps. At multi-hour durations, distinct spatial patterns highlight the varying dominance of convective versus stratiform precipitation mechanisms. This climatology provides new insights into storm behavior in complex terrain and can inform precipitation modeling, climate impact assessments, and hydro-geomorphological studies.
Author(s): Dallan E, Marra F, Papacharalampous G, Fowler HJ, Borga M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Water Resources Research
Year: 2026
Volume: 62
Issue: 8
Online publication date: 04/08/2026
Acceptance date: 25/07/2026
Date deposited: 18/08/2026
ISSN (print): 0043-1397
ISSN (electronic): 1944-7973
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Inc.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1029/2025WR043003
DOI: 10.1029/2025WR043003
Data Access Statement: Precipitation and temperature data are available from the following sources: Switzerland - MeteoSwiss (https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/), Austria—GeoSphere Austria (https://data.hub.geosphere.at/dataset/klima-v1-10min), France - Météo-France (https://meteo.data.gouv.fr/), and Italy—Agenzia Regionale per la Prevenzione e Protezione Ambientale del Veneto (https://www.arpa.veneto.it/), Provincia Autonoma di Trento (https://www.provincia.tn.it/), and Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano (https://meteo.provincia.bz.it/default.asp); Germany—(https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/cdc/cdc_ueberblick-klimadaten_en.html?nn=495490). The storm typology database is freely available in Papacharalampous et al. (2025b). The database of the averaged characteristics computed for all the stations is made freely available in Zenodo (Dallan, Marra, et al., 2025).
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