Spanish Study Finds No Increase In ‘Extreme’ Rainfall

Written by Climate Discussion Nexus on March 28, 2025. Posted in Current News

From Roger Pielke Jr. we learn about a new study from a team of Spanish scientists who have dug up more than a century of weather records to construct a (Spanish) nation-wide daily record of precipitation amounts spanning 1916 to 2022

The authors explain that many experts assume precipitation is decreasing in Mediterranean climates like Spain, but climate models project that extreme precipitation events should be increasing due to global warming.

And remarkably both seem to be wrong.

Studies based on relatively short data sets do sometimes show trends. But on the full data series over 107 years the authors find lots of variability but no evidence of a trend in the number or magnitude of extreme rainfall events.

Another prediction gets washed away, shrivels, or both.

The authors seem to acknowledge that climate models are often run with dubious assumptions such as the RCP8.5 scenario:

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC-AR6, 2021) published in 2021 indicates that there is no clear positive trend in extreme precipitation events, except under the most extreme scenario (RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5), which is considered as highly unlikely by some experts (Hausfather and Peters 2020; Hausfather et al. 2022; Pielke Jr. and Ritchie 2021; Burguess et al. 2022) and acknowledged as exaggerated by the IPCC itself (AR6 Table 12.12, Chapter 12, page 1856).”

And they don’t couch their negative finding in weasel words to try to protect the modelers from the news:

“This study found no evidence of an increase in the frequency of extraordinary precipitation events exceeding 100 or 200 mm in the Spanish mainland from 1916 to the present.

The observed variations in the frequency of extraordinary events seem to be more related to changes in the observation network rather than to a genuine increase in the frequency of extremes.”

In the Figure below, whether they count the annual number of daily events exceeding 100 mm (top panel) or 200 mm (bottom panel) the event counts do NOT show an upward trend:

They add:

“The irregularity in the density and distribution of observatories over the study period complicates any conclusions about long-term trends in the frequency of these extraordinary rainfall events.

However, it appears that the occurrences of both extraordinary precipitation events have remained relatively stable.”

So the bottom line is our climate system is complicated and prone to occasional outbursts of extreme weather, but also remarkably stable despite what the alarmists say.

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Header image: The Guardian

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