https://phys.org/news/2018-06-rainfall-future-extreme-weather-affect.html

Extreme weather, including heavy rainfall, drought and excessive heat, now threatens urban centers on an unprecedented scale. That's why Giuseppe Mascaro, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Arizona State University, sought to characterize daily rainfall in the Phoenix metropolitan area and throughout central Arizona using statistical models. His results are published in the Journal of Hydrology.

"Why do we want to characterize extremes?" asked Mascaro, a faculty member in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment—one of the six schools in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. "The recent occurrence of natural disasters triggered by heavy rainfall and the perception that this has been happening more frequently than usual require conducting this type of quantitative analysis to understand the current situation, compare it with the past and try to model the future."