Intensification of summer rainfall variability in the southeastern United States during recent decades
Abstract
The variability of summer precipitation in the southeastern United States is examined
in this study using 60-yr (1948-2007) rainfall data. The Southeast summer rainfalls
exhibited higher interannual variability with more intense summer droughts and anomalous
wetness in the recent 30 years (1978-2007) than in the prior 30 years (1948-77). Such
intensification of summer rainfall variability was consistent with a decrease of light
(0.1-1 mm day-1) and medium (1-10 mm day-1) rainfall events during extremely dry summers
and an increase of heavy (.10 mm day-1) rainfall events in extremely wet summers.
Changes in rainfall variability were also accompanied by a southward shift of the
region of maximum zonal wind variability at the jet stream level in the latter period.
The covariability between the Southeast summer precipitation and sea surface temperatures
(SSTs) is also analyzed using the singular value decomposition (SVD) method. It is
shown that the increase of Southeast summer precipitation variability is primarily
associated with a higher SST variability across the equatorial Atlantic and also SST
warming in the Atlantic. © 2010 American Meteorological Society.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/4291Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1175/2010JHM1229.1Publication Info
Wang; H; Fu, R; Kumar, A; & Li, W (2010). Intensification of summer rainfall variability in the southeastern United States during
recent decades. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 11(4). pp. 1007-1018. 10.1175/2010JHM1229.1. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/4291.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Wenhong Li
Associate Professor of Climate
Dr. Li's research interests focus primarily on climate dynamics, land-atmosphere interaction,
hydroclimatology, and climate modeling. Her current research is to understand how
the hydrological cycle changes in the current and future climate and their impacts
on the ecosystems, subtropical high variability and change, unforced global temperature variability,
and climate and health issues.

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