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Journal ArticleDOI

How Much More Rain Will Global Warming Bring

Frank J. Wentz, +3 more
- 13 Jul 2007 - 
- Vol. 317, Iss: 5835, pp 233-235
TLDR
Observations suggest that precipitation and total atmospheric water have increased at about the same rate over the past two decades, compared with the climate models and satellite observations.
Abstract
Climate models and satellite observations both indicate that the total amount of water in the atmosphere will increase at a rate of 7% per kelvin of surface warming. However, the climate models predict that global precipitation will increase at a much slower rate of 1 to 3% per kelvin. A recent analysis of satellite observations does not support this prediction of a muted response of precipitation to global warming. Rather, the observations suggest that precipitation and total atmospheric water have increased at about the same rate over the past two decades.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

The impacts of climate change on water resources and agriculture in China

TL;DR: It is found that notwithstanding the clear warming that has occurred in China in recent decades, current understanding does not allow a clear assessment of the impact of anthropogenic climate change on China’s water resources and agriculture and therefore China's ability to feed its people.
Journal ArticleDOI

Changes in precipitation with climate change

TL;DR: There is a direct influence of global warming on precipitation as mentioned in this paper, as the water holding capacity of air increases by about 7% per 1°C warming, which leads to increased water vapor in the atmosphere.
Book Chapter

Chapter 12 - Long-term climate change: Projections, commitments and irreversibility

TL;DR: The authors assesses long-term projections of climate change for the end of the 21st century and beyond, where the forced signal depends on the scenario and is typically larger than the internal variability of the climate system.
Journal ArticleDOI

The global climatology of an interannually varying air–sea flux data set

TL;DR: The air-sea fluxes of momentum, heat, freshwater and their components have been computed globally from 1948 to 2006 at frequencies ranging from 6-hourly to monthly as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI

Atmospheric Warming and the Amplification of Precipitation Extremes

TL;DR: Observations reveal a distinct link between rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods, implying that projections of future changes in rainfall extremes in response to anthropogenic global warming may be underestimated.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

The Version 2 Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) Monthly Precipitation Analysis (1979-Present)

TL;DR: The Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) version 2 Monthly Precise Analysis as discussed by the authors is a merged analysis that incorporates precipitation estimates from low-orbit satellite microwave data, geosynchronous-orbit-satellite infrared data, and rain gauge observations.
Journal ArticleDOI

Robust Responses of the Hydrological Cycle to Global Warming

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined some aspects of the hydrological cycle that are robust across the models, including the decrease in convective mass fluxes, the increase in horizontal moisture transport, the associated enhancement of the pattern of evaporation minus precipitation and its temporal variance, and decrease in the horizontal sensible heat transport in the extratropics.
Book

Physics of Climate

TL;DR: A review of the present understanding of the global climate system, consisting of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere, and their complex interactions and feedbacks is given from the point of view of a physicist as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI

Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrologic cycle

TL;DR: It will be substantially harder to quantify the range of possible changes in the hydrologic cycle than in global-mean temperature, both because the observations are less complete and because the physical constraints are weaker.
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