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FUTURE CROP YIELDS

Heavy rain, come today

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 805–806 (2020)Cite this article

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More intense precipitation is an expected consequence of anthropogenic climate change. Now research quantifies the effect of more concentrated rainfall on American agriculture.

There is little good news regarding anthropogenic climate change and crops. The clearest signal of global warming, hotter temperatures, has been clearly linked to lowered crop yields. Precipitation is more complicated, both in terms of how it will change and how that change will affect crop yields. The most robust response of rainfall to climate change is a concentration of rainfall events — a decrease in mild showers and an increase in intense storms. Writing in this issue of Nature Climate Change, Lesk et al.1 report that American maize and soy will benefit from the new precipitation regime.

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Fig. 1: High-resolution rainfall.

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  1. Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA

    Ethan E. Butler

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  1. Ethan E. Butler
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Correspondence to Ethan E. Butler.

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Butler, E.E. Heavy rain, come today. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 805–806 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0834-9

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