Precipitation Extremes Under Climate Change

By P. O’Gorman. Current Climate Change Reports, 2015

739 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The response of precipitation extremes to climate change is considered using results from theory, modeling, and observations, with a focus on the physical factors that control the response. Observations and simulations with climate models show that precipitation extremes intensify in response to a warming climate. However, the sensitivity of precipitation extremes to warming remains uncertain when convection is important, and it may be higher in the tropics than the extratropics. Several physical contributions govern the response of precipitation extremes. The thermodynamic contribution is robust and well understood, but theoretical understanding of the microphysical and dynamical contributions is still being developed. Orographic precipitation extremes and snowfall extremes respond differently from other precipitation extremes and require particular attention. Outstanding research challenges include the influence of mesoscale convective organization, the dependence on the duration considered, and the need to better constrain the sensitivity of tropical precipitation extremes to warming.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef42bbba83f0898afb413811b1aaf1872ed5ecbe

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In Atmospheric Science

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Citations in the corpus

• Extreme weather impacts of climate change: an attribution perspective (2022, background): “…moisture at a given pressure: the Clausius–Clapeyron relation states that the increase in moisture held at a given pressure is 6%–7% per 1 ◦C. Extra water in the atmosphere combines with changes in weather patterns to affect rainfall extremes in a given region (O’Gorman 2015, Pfahl et al 2017).”
• Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events (2017, background): “However, thermodynamic arguments suggest that global warming should have increased the event probability by increasing atmospheric moisture (2, 48).”