Extreme rainfall trends of 21 typical urban areas in China during 1998–2015 based on remotely sensed data sets

With the increase of population, many cities are growing in size at a phenomenal rate. Urbanization changes the urban underlying surface, influences the micro-climate, and sometimes affects the local precipitation process. In this study, we investigated the trends of extreme rainfall in China’s 21 typical urban areas. Based on a series of daily rainfall and “Urban/built-up” dataset from TMPA 3B42 and MCD12Q1 products in China, trends in extreme precipitation, with the threshold defined as 95th (pre95p) and 99th (pre99p) percentiles of annual rain days during 1998–2015, have been assessed in China, and especially in 21 typical urban areas from 1998 to 2015. The tendency curves in extreme rainfall of different years are presented. In this period, more than 66% regions of China covered by TMPA 3B42 have increasing trends in extreme rainfall with pre95p threshold. The 21 typical urban areas showed different trends—in over half of these areas, upward tendencies in extreme rainfall were observed, particularly in Dalian, Beijing, and Chongqing. Seventeen urban areas showed increasing tendencies in pre95p extreme rainfall days, including Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Suzhou in the Yangtze River Delta region. The results also illustrate that southeastern coastal urban areas of China may have experienced decreasing occurrences in extreme rainfall.