Rising temperatures due to global warming will cause increasingly extreme rainfall in the tropics, causing many problems in areas already subjected to high amounts of precipitation.
This is indicated by the study published in the journal Science Advances, which used a new very high resolution climate model to understand the mechanisms underlying these extreme climate events.
According to the results obtained by the group led by the Institute of Science and Technology of Austria, the key lies in the fact that higher temperatures push the clouds to aggregate more and therefore to dump greater quantities of rainfall on the same areas, simultaneously causing those to expand very arid, which will receive less and less water.
Extreme precipitation is one of the most damaging natural disasters, and its frequency has increased in recent years due to climate change.
Until now, however, the climate models used to study these phenomena could not take into account in particular detail the mechanisms at play, and therefore were unable to calculate many of the complex dynamics that push clouds to gather and generate more intense events.
To overcome this problem, researchers led by Jiawei Bao turned to a new climate model that achieves a level of detail previously impossible: while previous versions generally had a spatial resolution of around 100 kilometers, this one has one of just 5 kilometers .
“This new model showed that, with a warming climate, extreme precipitation events in the tropics increase in severity more than previously predicted,” explains Bao.
“We can see, in fact, that when the clouds are thicker it rains for a longer time.
Furthermore – adds the researcher – the more extreme rainfall in areas with high rainfall will cause the arid zones to expand, a further step, therefore, towards extreme weather patterns”.
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