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Extreme precipitation

Increases all round

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 443–444 (2016)Cite this article

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Globally, extreme rainfall is expected to increase with warming, but regional changes over land have been less certain. Now research shows that this intense precipitation has increased across both the wetter and the drier parts of the continents, and will continue to do so as global warming continues.

People, crops and cities cannot survive long without fresh water, which almost entirely originates from rain. But one can have too much of a good thing — our habit of living by sources of fresh water may be convenient, but it also increases the risk of flooding. Global average precipitation is expected to increase moderately with global warming1,2, but nobody lives in the global average. It is extreme rain in a particular catchment that can have devastating consequences, so changes on smaller space- and timescales are important for planning and adaptation. Over the ocean, we expect the overall geographical pattern to follow a 'wet gets wetter, dry gets dryer' trend2. This means that net evaporation will increase where it already exceeds precipitation, whereas net precipitation will increase where it dominates at present. But over the continents, where most of the world's population lives, it has been less clear to what extent this trend applies2. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Markus Donat and colleagues3 show that observations and models agree in showing that extreme rain increases when averaged over either the drier or the wetter parts of the continents.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. and the Department of Physics, William Ingram is at the Met Office Hadley Centre, FitzRoy Road, Exeter, Devon EX1 3PB, UK, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3PU, UK,

    William Ingram

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  1. William Ingram
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Correspondence to William Ingram.

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Ingram, W. Increases all round. Nature Clim Change 6, 443–444 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2966

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2966

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