Oceanic influence on extreme rainfall trends in the north central coast of Venezuela: present and future climate assessments

Extreme events are an important part of climate variability and their intensity and persistence are often modulated by large scale climatic patterns which might act as forcing drivers affecting their probability of occurrence. When the North Tropical Atlantic (NTA) and the Equatorial Pacific (Ni~no 3 region) sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies are of opposite signs and the first one is positive while the second one is negative, the rainfall response is stronger in the northern coast of Venezuela as well as in the Pacific coast of Central America during the Nov-Feb period. The difference between these two SST anomaly time series (NTA-Niño 3) is used in this analysis and it is called the Atlantic-Pacific Index or API. By fitting a dynamic generalized extreme value (GEV) model to station based daily rainfall at different locations and to the Xie and Arkin dataset for the Vargas state, we found the API index to be an adequate index to explain the probabilistic nature of rainfall extremes in the northern Venezuelan coast for the months Nov-Feb. Dependence between the Atlantic-Pacific index and the probabilistic behavior of extreme rainfall was also explored for simulations from two global coupled General Circulation Models for the 20th century climate (20C3M experiment) and the 21st century climate (SRES A2 experiment): the Echam5 model and the HadCM3 model. A significant dependence of extreme rainfall on the Atlantic-Pacific index is well described by the GEV dynamic model for the Echam5 20C3M experiment model outputs. When looking at future climates under the SRES A2 experiment, the dependence of extreme rainfall from the API index is still significant for the middle part of the 21st century (2046-2064), while this dependence fades off for the latest part of the century (2081-2099).