Detecting the heaviness of daily rainfall probability distributions in Europe through an expeditious method, the Obesity Index

Extreme precipitation events have a significant impact on hydraulic infrastructure design and risk management. The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Grand Challenges highlights the need for further investigation in analyzing and modeling weather and climate extremes due to their substantial effects. These rare meteorological occurrences represent the upper tail of the probability distribution, which can be effectively defined as heavy or light. The Obesity Index (OB) represents a user-friendly, non-parametric, empirical method capable of quantitatively assessing the heaviness of probability distribution tails directly from the original dataset, without the need to extract only extreme values. Our assessment of OB involves two distinct gridded datasets: one specific to Italy (SCIA) and another covering the entire Europe (E-OBS). The analysis shows a robust correlation between OB and L-moment ratios (L-variation, L-skewness, L-kurtosis), along with the Coefficient of Variation (CV). It is interesting to note that the tail heaviness in a specific region may vary depending on the dataset employed. For instance, OB indicates a prevalence of heavy tails across Italy or lighter tails in specific areas of the peninsula when employing SCIA or E-OBS dataset, respectively. This divergence could be attributed to an excessive smoothing of rainfall observations during the interpolation procedures used in generating E-OBS dataset. Thus, our findings reinforce the thesis of using light-tail probability distributions with caution when addressing rainfall extremes.