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The Great Plains of the United States, late twenty-first century: breadbasket or dust bowl?
It may depend on groundwater storage, finds a study published in Nature Geoscience this week (subscription required). The results are based on an unusually sophisticated watershed model that connects the below-ground water sources, surface water and the land surface itself.
Global warming has been expected to bring not only droughts, but also floods, because what rain you get comes hammering down harder. And the downpours of the future now look to be even more drenching than expected.
A new Nature Geoscience paper (subscription required) considers the intensity of precipitation measured hour by hour for a century in the Dutch town of De Bilt. Theoretically, it’s thought that the intensity of rainfall, including the biggest cloudbursts, should rise by 7% for each degree Celsius that the temperature goes up. That’s based on a thermodynamics equation called the Clausius-Clapeyron relation - and it’s what you see if you look at extreme rainfall on the scale of days.
But it's the rainiest hours, not the rainiest days, that interest the paper's authors, Geert Lenderink and Erik Van Meijgaard of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. That turns out to make a difference.
Continue reading "A precipitous rise in extreme rainfall " »
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