Inconsistent Frequency Trends Between Hourly and Daily Precipitation During Warm Season in Mainland of China

Abstract Precipitation change is determined by changes in frequency and intensity. Based on hourly and daily precipitation data sets in China (1961–2014) and CMIP6 model, this study found that observed inconsistency in the frequency trend at the two time resolutions (hourly and daily) reflected precipitation becoming more concentrated at 13.4% of stations, resulting in the specific precipitation phenomenon of “more hours in one day, but fewer days.” However, models exhibited opposite precipitation phenomenon at 16.5% of stations and cannot reproduce the widespread increase in the proportion of extreme precipitation amounts (PA) in the total PA, especially at an hourly resolution. Although stations with significant trend from CMIP6 approximately twice the observation, both CMIP6 and observations showed that frequency and intensity changes dominated the total PA trend at hourly and daily time resolutions, respectively. These results demonstrated that daily precipitation observations could not fully capture the important features of short‐duration rainfall.