Inferences of Predictability Associated with Warm Season Precipitation Episodes

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Herein preliminary findings are reported from a radar-based climatology of warm season precipitation ''episodes.'' Episodes are defined as time-space clusters of heavy precipitation that often result from sequences of organized convection such as squall lines, mesoscale convective systems, and mesoscale convective complexes. Episodes exhibit coherent rainfall patterns, characteristic of propagating events, under a broad range of atmospheric conditions. Such rainfall patterns are most frequent under ''weakly forced'' conditions in midsummer. The longevity of episodes, up to 60 h, suggests an intrinsic predictability of warm season rainfall that significantly exceeds the lifetime of individual convective systems.