Climate Change is Altering Rainfall Patterns Worldwide
By Stephanie Paige Ogburn and ClimateWire
Global precipitation patterns are being moved in new directions by climate change, a new study has found.
The research, published yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first study to find the signal of climate change in global precipitation shifts across land and ocean.
"It's worth saying that this is another grain of sand on that vast pile of evidence that climate change is real and is occurring," said study co-author Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Climate models predict that the addition of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere will shift precipitation in two main ways. The first shift is in a strengthening of existing precipitation patterns. This is commonly called "wet get wetter, dry get drier."
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-is-altering-rainfall-patterns-worldwide