Diagnosing Human-Induced Dynamic and Thermodynamic Drivers of Extreme Rainfall

Factors responsible for extreme monthly rainfall over Texas and Oklahoma during May 2015 are assessed. The event had a return period of at least 400 years, in contrast to the prior record, which was roughly a 100-yr event. The event challenges attribution science to disentangle factors because it occurred during a strong El Nino, a natural pattern of variability that affects the region's springtime rains, and during the warmest global mean temperatures since 1880. Effects of each factor are diagnosed, as is the interplay between El Nino dynamics and human-induced climate change. Analysis of historical climate simulations reveals that El Nino was a necessary condition for monthly rains to occur having the severity of May 2015. The model results herein further reveal that a 2015 magnitude event, whether conditioned on El Nino or not, was made neither more intense nor more likely to be due to human-induced climate change over the past century. The intensity of extreme May rainfall over Texas and Oklahoma, analogous to the 2015 event, increases by roughly 5% by the latter half of the twenty-first century. No material changes occur in either El Nino-related teleconnections or in overall atmospheric dynamics during extreme May rainfall over the twenty-first century. The increased severity of Texas/Oklahoma May rainfall events in the future is principally due to thermodynamic driving, although much less than implied by simple Clausius-Clapeyron scaling arguments given a projected 23% increase in atmospheric precipitable water vapor. Other thermodynamic factors are identified that act in opposition to the increase in atmospheric water vapor, thereby reducing the effectiveness of overall thermodynamic driving of extreme May rainfall changes over Texas and Oklahoma.