Changes in Spatiotemporal Precipitation Patterns in Changing Climate Conditions

By Won Chang, Michael L. Stein, Jiali Wang, V. Kotamarthi, E. Moyer. 2016

79 citations recorded by the source corpus.

AbstractClimate models robustly imply that some significant change in precipitation patterns will occur. Models consistently project that the intensity of individual precipitation events increases by approximately 6%–7% K−1, following the increase in atmospheric water content, but that total precipitation increases by a lesser amount (1%–2% K−1 in the global average in transient runs). Some other aspect of precipitation events must then change to compensate for this difference. The authors develop a new methodology for identifying individual rainstorms and studying their physical characteristics—including starting location, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and trajectory—that allows identifying that compensating mechanism. This technique is applied to precipitation over the contiguous United States from both radar-based data products and high-resolution model runs simulating 80 years of business-as-usual warming. In the model study the dominant compensating mechanism is a reduction of storm size. In s...

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/caaeb8152036360cd2493d34e94412c74feb659a