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Letter

Nature Geoscience 1, 511–514 (1 August 2008) | doi:10.1038/ngeo262

Increase in hourly precipitation extremes beyond expectations from temperature|[nbsp]|changes

Geert Lenderink & Erik van Meijgaard

Changes in precipitation extremes under greenhouse warming are commonly assumed to be constrained by changes in the amounts of precipitable water in the atmosphere. Global climate models generally predict only marginal changes in relative humidity, implying that the actual amount of atmospheric precipitable water scales with the water vapour content of saturation, which is governed by the Clausius–Clapeyron relation.