Rainfall and Dragon-Kings

Previous studies have found broad distributions, resembling power laws for different measures of the size of rainfall events. We investigate the large-event tail of these distributions and find in one measure that tropical cyclones account for a large proportion of the very largest events outside the scaling regime, i.e., beyond the cutoff of the power law. Tropical cyclones are sufficiently rare that they contribute a significant number only in a regime of large event sizes that common rain events almost never reach. The different physical dynamics of tropical cyclones permits a substantial extension of the tail in this large-event regime.