Key Points
While most people think about global warming in terms of extreme heatthe deadliest kind of natural disaster in the United Statesthere is also an increasing risk of extreme precipitation..
In other words, more moisture might just result in more humidity without rain.. Its historically been a challenge for scientists to disentangle the natural variability of rains and the influence of climate change, says climate scientist Yoo-Geun Ham, of Chonnam National University in South Korea (a country thats been grappling with flooding)..
When you heat the ocean surface by a degree or something like that, you actually increase the amount of water that is coming into California through these atmospheric rivers, says Rao Kotamarthi, senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory who studies precipitation and climate change..
When we talk about extreme precipitationand we look at the impact it has in terms of severe flooding and damage to infrastructureit really matters whether precipitation is falling as rain or snow, says Mohammed Ombadi, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan and lead author of the paper..
What we see is that global warming is not only increasing precipitation due to having more water vapor in the atmosphere, but a higher proportion of this extreme presentation is falling as rain instead of snow...
