Tropical ecosystems are characterized by high annual rainfall associated with weather-driven natural hazards. Indonesia, which constitutes the largest part of the Maritime Continent, is exposed to extreme rain accumulation (Chang et al. 2005) and thus, landslides and floods (e.g. Sekaranom and Masunaga 2017; Baranowski et al. 2020). Population growth, deforestation, significant changes in land use resulting in shrinking retention areas along with climate change make the country vulnerable for such hazardous events.
Chang, C. P., Z. Wang, J. McBride, and C. H. Liu, 2005: Annual cycle of Southeast Asia - Maritime continent rainfall and the asymmetric monsoon transition. J. Clim., https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-3257.1.
Sekaranom, A. B., and H. Masunaga, 2017: Comparison of TRMM-derived rainfall products for general and extreme rains over the maritime continent. J. Appl. Meteorol. Climatol., https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMCD-16-0272.1.
Baranowski, D. B., and Coauthors, 2020: Social-media and newspaper reports reveal large-scale meteorological drivers of floods on Sumatra. Nat. Commun., 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16171-2.
In the literature, various definitions of extreme precipitation are used. Typically, an "extreme" precipitation event is characterized by three key components:
Metric (e.g., percentile thresholds),
Timescale (e.g., multi-day accumulation), and
Spatial scale (e.g., station-based measurements).
The specific definitions applied to the data in this study are described below.