Yash Gupta, Manabendra Saharia, Bhupendranath Goswami

Studies of rainfall are usually based on the total amount precipitating throughout a certain period. Compared to rain rates associated with extreme events, the rain rates associated with periods when most of the rainfall occur are not studied extensively. In this study, the characteristics of daily precipitation in India are explored using two metrics - rain frequency peak (the most frequent non-zero rain rate) and rain amount peak (the rain rate at which the most amount of rain falls). These metrics are computed over India using local and global datasets to investigate the characteristics of typical daily precipitation accumulations. These values are sensitive to the dataset used for this analysis since it is expected that the temporal and spatial resolution of the rainfall data will influence the rain frequency peak and rain amount peak. The maximum rain frequency peak for any region in India reaches up to a value of 35 mm/day while the maximum rain amount peak reaches up to a value as high as 90 mm/day. Findings of the study indicate that the two metrics defined are sufficient to examine various measures of precipitation characteristics and unravel regional differences in a simple manner.