Extreme precipitation events: a comprehensive catalog for northern Chile (17.5° S to 30.0° S)

This study presents a comprehensive catalog of the most extreme seasonal rainfall events of northern Chile between 1979 and 2019. We analyzed its meteorological patterns across three latitudinal bands (17.5–23.5° S, 23.5–27° S, and 27–30° S) using daily precipitation and mean daily temperature from the CR2METv2.5 product, and vertically integrated water vapor transport data (IVT) from the ERA5 reanalysis. These events were classified into three main precipitation categories: Stratiform , Coast , and Andes Mountain . The Andes Mountain category was further subdivided into five subcategories based on IVT patterns and precipitation spatial distribution: North Andes , South Andes , Along Andes , Convergence , and Westerly IVT . In total, the catalog comprises 472 extreme precipitation events corresponding to 408 unique storm dates, each characterized by date, precipitation category, maximum precipitation within the latitudinal band, average storm temperature, and snow line elevation determined through empirical methods and remote sensing from daily MODIS imagery. The dataset is available as a CSV catalog with additional NetCDF files containing gridded precipitation, IVT, and MODIS snow cover fields for each event. To test the applicability of this catalog, we characterized extreme events composite results for the Austral summer between 27–30° S (latitudinal band 3), showing that events within each category yield coherent synoptic patterns. Additionally, we contrasted our catalog with an existing national landslide inventory of 548 events in the study area, finding that just six cataloged storms (all classified as Stratiform ) account for 203 debris flow events (37 %), indicating the March 2015 and May 2017 storms were alone responsible for 168 of them. We also estimated the approximate debris flow volumes for the March 2015 Atacama event using a transport-capacity approach, showing reasonable agreement for deposits larger than 4000 m ³ . These findings enhance our understanding of extreme precipitation events in Chile and provide a valuable resource for storyline analysis and precipitation pattern identification. Catalog is available at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.14342935 (Matus et al., 2026).