Science Source
Human-induced changes in the distribution of rainfall
- Considers three ways in which planetary warming might influence the global distribution of precipitation:
- Rainfall in the tropics could increase and the subtropics and mid-latitudes could become more arid
- Earth’s thermal equator, around which the planet’s rain belts and dry zones are organized, could migrate northward
- Both of these scenarios could play out simultaneously
- Reviews paleoclimate evidence from the last glacial maximum, the Bølling-Allerød climatic transition, and the Little Ice Age
- Inspects more recent trends in seasonal surface heating between the hemispheres over the past several decades
- Concludes that during boreal summer, in which the rate of recent warming has been relatively uniform between the hemispheres, wet areas will get wetter and dry regions will become drier
- Concludes that during boreal winter, rain belts and drylands will expand northward in response to differential heating between the hemispheres
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