Added Values of Convection-Permitting Models for Extreme Precipitation over the Southeastern Tibetan Plateau

The southeastern Tibetan Plateau (SETP) lies at the intersection of extreme topography and the Indian summer monsoon, producing intense orographically driven precipitation. Resolving these extremes requires convection-permitting simulations (CPMs) due to the combined influence of complex terrain and vigorous convection. However, kilometer-scale simulations over SETP remain limited to short periods because of computational cost, preventing robust estimation of precipitation extremes. We analyze a decade of 1 km CPMs and apply the Simplified Metastatistical Extreme Value (SMEV) framework, which uses all wet-day precipitation rather than annual maxima, increasing the effective sample size by an order of magnitude. We apply the SMEV framework to estimate daily precipitation return levels up to 100 years. While SMEV increases the effective sample size, uncertainty remains non-negligible for long return periods when derived from a decadal record. Results show that CPMs’ estimates align with observations within 90% bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs). For instance, at a representative station (Obs: 51.6 mm/d), the 50-year return level is estimated at 57.1 mm/d (CI: 47.1–68.9 mm/d). In contrast, coarse-resolution products systematically overestimate these extremes by 50–100%, with their estimates often falling far outside the observed range beyond 20-year return periods. CPMs also reveal a model-derived, non-monotonic elevation dependence absent in coarse datasets. Instead of monotonic decline, three phrases emerge: a weak increase below 2700 m, a sharp decrease across mid-elevations, and a reversal above ~5300 m where orographic uplift enhances extremes, yielding a 2.3-fold increase. These results show that CPMs alter not only magnitude but also the spatial structure and elevation scaling of precipitation extremes, providing a physically constrained framework for extreme-value estimation in data-sparse mountains.