We're told there are patterns which 'appear to be created by Rossby waves – wiggles in fast-flowing currents of air high in the atmosphere, known as the jet streams.'
An analysis of satellite data has revealed global patterns of extreme rainfall, which could lead to better forecasts and more accurate climate models, reports Phys.org.
Extreme rainfall—defined as the top five percent of rainy days—often forms a pattern at the local level, for example tracking across Europe.
But new research, published today in Nature, reveals that there are also larger-scale global patterns to extreme rainfall events.
These patterns connect through the atmosphere rather than over land—for example, extreme rainfall in Europe can precede extreme rainfall in India by around five days, without extreme rain in the countries in between.
The research, led by a team at Imperial College London and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, could help better predict when and where extreme rainfall events will occur around the world. The insights can be used to test and improve global climate models, leading to better predictions.
The study additionally provides a 'baseline' for climate change studies. By knowing how the atmosphere behaves to create patterns of extreme rainfall events, scientists will be able to gain new insights into changes that may be caused by global warming.
Lead author Dr. Niklas Boers, from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Grantham Institute—Climate Change and Environment at Imperial, said: "Uncovering this global pattern of connections in the data can improve weather and climate models.
This is especially true for the emerging picture of couplings between the tropics and the European and North American regions and their consequences for extreme rainfall.
"This finding could also help us understand the connections between different monsoon systems and extreme events within them. I hope that our results will, in the long term, help to predict extreme rainfall and associated flash floods and landslides in northeast Pakistan, north India and Nepal. There have been several such hazards in recent years, with devastating consequences in these regions, such as the 2010 Pakistan flood."
To find patterns in extreme rainfall events, the team developed a new method rooted in complex system theory to study high-resolution satellite data of rainfall.
Continued here.
from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2MGNEed
