Changes in daily extreme precipitation events in South China from 1961 to 2011

Based on the daily precipitation from a 0.5°×0.5° gridded dataset and meteorological stations during 1961–2011 released by National Meteorological Information Center, the reliability of this gridded precipitation dataset in South China was evaluated. Five precipitation indices recommended by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) were selected to investigate the changes in precipitation extremes of South China. The results indicated that the bias between gridded data interpolated to given stations and the corresponding observed data is limited, and the proportion of the number of stations with bias between −10% and 0 is 50.64%. The correlation coefficients between gridded data and observed data are generally above 0.80 in most parts. The average of precipitation indices shows a significant spatial difference with drier northwest section and wetter southeast section. The trend magnitudes of the maximum 5-day precipitation (RX5day), very wet day precipitation (R95), very heavy precipitation days (R20mm) and simple daily intensity index (SDII) are 0.17 mm·a−1, 1.14 mm·a−1, 0.02 d·a−1 and 0.01 mm·d−1·a−1, respectively, while consecutive wet days (CWD) decrease by −0.05 d·a−1 during 1961–2011. There is spatial disparity in trend magnitudes of precipitation indices, and approximate 60.85%, 75.32% and 75.74% of the grid boxes show increasing trends for RX5day, SDII and R95, respectively. There are high correlations between precipitation indices and total precipitation, which is statistically significant at the 0.01 level.