Identification of spatio-temporal patterns in extreme rainfall events in the Tropical Andes: A clustering analysis approach

High spatio-temporal variability is a characteristic of extreme rainfall. In mountainous regions like the Tropical Andes, where intricate orography and mesoscale atmospheric dynamics greatly impact rainfall systems, this particularly holds for mountain areas like the Tropical Andes. Thus, the absence of operational rainfall monitoring networks with high spatio-temporal resolution has imposed difficulties for a proper analysis of extreme rainfall events in the Ecuadorian Andes. Nowhere, we present our improved knowledge on rainfall extremes based on newly available rainfall radar data of this region. In our study we employ a clustering approach to identify types of extreme rainfall events and analyze their spatio-temporal characteristics. Based on 3 years of data obtained from an X-band scanning weather radar data, the study was conducted in the southern Ecuadorian Tropical Andes at 4450 m a.s.l. By applying a rainfall threshold, 67 extreme rainfall events were selected. The rainfall characteristics of each extreme rainfall event, such as the amount of rain, its duration, its hour, and month of occurrence were determined and used as input variables of a k-means clustering analysis to group the events into different classes. The result revealed three main classes of extreme rainfall events. The first class is characterized by highest rain intensity and lowest duration. The second class is characterized by its month of occurrence, during the first 5 months of the year. The third class showed lowest rain intensity and highest duration mainly occurred at higher elevations. The typology of events advances our understanding of the spatio-temporal characteristics of extreme rainfall in the Tropical Andes.