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Opposing local precipitation extremes

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 389–390 (2015)Cite this article

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To the Editor —

Increases in atmospheric temperature are expected to result in a greater intensity of extreme precipitation in most mid-latitude land masses1,2. It is increasingly acknowledged that the changing intensity of extreme precipitation will depend on the geographic location1; here we identify a mechanism that can cause very different — or even opposing — trends at the same location.

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Figure 1: Average decadal changes in precipitation for the Greater Sydney region over 1966–2012.
Figure 2

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Acknowledgements

This project was supported by the Federal Government through Geoscience Australia as part of the revision of Australian Rainfall and Runoff by Engineers Australia. We thank members of Engineers Australia for their contribution to this paper and project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 5005, South Australia, Australia

    Feifei Zheng, Seth Westra & Michael Leonard

Authors
  1. Feifei Zheng
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  2. Seth Westra
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  3. Michael Leonard
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seth Westra.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

The Greater Sydney region with 69 subdaily rainfall gauges (black dots) (PDF 436 kb)

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Zheng, F., Westra, S. & Leonard, M. Opposing local precipitation extremes. Nature Clim Change 5, 389–390 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2579

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