Fig. 1: Observed changes in the global spatial distribution of terrestrial tropical cyclone (TC) heavy rainfall (≥30 mm per 3 h) over 1980–2023.

a Time series of the landward distance of global TC rainfall (solid lines) and its trend (dashed lines), derived from the Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP; Methods) dataset; shaded areas indicate two-sided 95% confidence intervals derived from linear regression (P values are derived from the Mann–Kendall test; Methods). b Linear trends in the landward distance of TC rainfall from the MSWEP (1980–2023; blue bars) and Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG; 1998–2023; red bars) datasets in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) and Southern Hemisphere (SH). Single and double asterisks indicate significance at the 90% and 95% confidence levels, respectively (Mann–Kendall test; Methods); error bars denote 95% confidence intervals. c Global distribution of TC tracks (gray lines) and rainfall frequency (count of occurrences, within a specified grid, where rainfall rate ≥30 mm per 3 h; shading) based on the best-track (Methods) and MSWEP datasets. d–f compare TC rainfall frequency distributions between pre-2001 (blue shading) and post-2001 (red shading) along the continental coasts of the western North Atlantic (d), Bay of Bengal (e), and western North Pacific (f); gray dots denote TC-center records, and the curved black solid and dashed lines denote the 500-km offshore and 100-km inland boundaries, respectively. The straight black solid line denotes the along-coast boundary. TC rainfall frequency is calculated for each 0.1° × 0.1° latitude–longitude grid over land. TC centers are restricted to a coastal zone spanning from 500 km offshore to 100 km inland. A TC rainfall radius threshold of 500 km and a landmass size threshold of 790,000 km² are applied throughout.