Rainfall extremes, weather and climate drivers in complex terrain: A data-driven approach based on signal enhancement methods and EV modeling

We apply the framework to a complex terrain region: the Western Andean Ridge in Ecuador and Peru (0-6°S) using ground data from the second half of the 20th century. Overall, we show that the framework, which does not make any prior assumption on the explanatory power of the weather and climate drivers, allows identification of well-known and new features of the regional climate in a purely data-driven fashion. Thus, the approach shows potential to identify weather controls on precipitation extremes in data-scarce and orographically complex regions in which model reconstructions are the only climate proxies.