Climatology of Storm Characteristics for Sub‐Daily Heavy Precipitation in the Greater Alpine Region

Abstract

Characterizing storms that generate heavy precipitation across different timescales is essential for parameterizing and assessing stochastic weather generators, evaluating climate models, enhancing risk management, and understanding climate change impacts. This study develops a detailed climatology of precipitation and temperature time series for storms producing heavy rainfall at sub‐hourly to daily scales across the Greater Alpine Region. Using a high‐resolution data set from ∼400 climate stations with 15–44 years of records for which a storm typology is available, we identify independent storm events and describe them through multiple characteristics, including peak intensity, lifetime, depth, temporal structure, internal variability, and thermal and geographical attributes. At each climate station, we focus on storms producing the largest 10% of the precipitation intensities at durations from 10 min to 24 hr. Results show that storm characteristics vary systematically with both duration and geography. At sub‐hourly scales, the highest intensities are typically generated by short‐lived storms with front‐loaded temporal profiles, high internal variability, and warmer conditions, especially in lowland regions, and exhibit evident reverse elevation‐intensity relationship. At daily scales, the highest intensities are associated with storms of greater depth, more symmetric temporal profiles, and smaller pre‐to‐within‐storm temperature differences, particularly in the inner Alps. At multi‐hour durations, distinct spatial patterns highlight the varying dominance of convective versus stratiform precipitation mechanisms. This climatology provides new insights into storm behavior in complex terrain and can inform precipitation modeling, climate impact assessments, and hydro‐geomorphological studies.