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Metrics For Understanding Large-Scale Controls Of Multivariate Temperature And Precipitation Variability, John P. O'Brien, Travis A. O'Brien, Christina M. Patricola, S.-Y. Simon Wang

Plants, Soils, and Climate Faculty Publications

Two or more spatio-temporally co-located meteorological/climatological extremes (co-occurring extremes) place far greater stress on human and ecological systems than any single extreme could. This was observed during the California drought of 2011–2015 where multiple years of negative precipitation anomalies occurred simultaneously with positive temperature anomalies resulting in California’s worst drought on observational record. The large-scale drivers which modulate the occurrence of extremes in two or more variables remains largely unexplored. Using California wintertime (November–April) temperature and precipitation as a case study, we apply a novel, nonparametric conditional probability distribution method that allows for evaluation of complex, multivariate, and nonlinear relationships …