We can all agree that climate change is happening. Whether we’re causing the climate change to the extent that we feel we are or that this is part of a normal climate adjustment is open for debate. One thing about climate change is that it may impact other areas of life.
For instance, today we want to share the ways in which climate change can affect rainfall. Rainfall is needed in our world to keep the ecosystem running efficiently and of course, we need water to stay alive. Continue reading to learn some ways in which climate change can affect rainfall or is currently affecting rainfall.
Let’s start by saying that rainfall is harder to predict than temperature change is. While it’s difficult to predict the rainfall changes, there are some facts that scientists can predict regarding climate change and its impact on rainfall in our future.
A warmer atmosphere will hold more moisture. While our climate starts to warm up, there’s more moisture retained in the atmosphere which helps increase rainfall or some form of precipitation by 1-2% for every one degree the climate warms up.
Some regions will see different changes with rainfall or lack of rainfall as our climate change continues and the weather continues to warm. Europe, as an example, may see wetter winters while dryer climates will continue to remain dry.
With a warmer climate, the rainfall could be more intense with fewer events. This means rainfall could occur less often during the year but have a higher risk of flooding during these events. Having less frequent rainfall could increase the drought conditions in between the intense flood-like rainfall.
There has been a recent study in the UK that cited humans have impacted climate change in a way that increased the risk of damaging floods in England and Wales during the autumn season in the year 2000. When looking at the UK, it’s predicted that climate change will increase this region’s flooding rains in the current year.
The current tools scientists use to try to predict climate change’s impact on rainfall are processed on a small scale that mimics our atmosphere. This does provide us with some suggestions on how rainfall could be less frequent but more extreme. As the processes get narrowed down to predict more accurately we’ll soon find that climate change impacts rainfall in a more dramatic way than we can currently predict.
While it’s still difficult to predict exactly how climate change will affect rainfall, scientists are constantly working on models to help with rainfall predictions. You can expect more details about how much rainfall will change in the future as models began to advance due to technological advancements and knowledge of climate change increase.