As damaging as it was for more than 32 trillion gallons of rain and snow to fall on California since Christmas, a worst-case global warming scenario could juice up similar future downpours by one-third by the middle of this century, a new study says.
The strongest of California's storms from atmospheric rivers, long and wide plumes of moisture that form over an ocean and flow through the sky over land, would probably get an overall 34% increase in total precipitation, or another 11 trillion gallons more than just fell.
Leung used regional scale computer simulations to predict what the worst of the western winter storms will be like between 2040 and 2070 in a scenario where carbon emissions have run amok. She looked at total precipitation, how concentrated peak raining and snowing would be and the area that gets hit. All three factors grow for the West in general.
And those flash floods are likely to get worse from what Leung's paper calls a"sharpening" effect that happens in an ever warmer world. That means more rainfall concentrated in the central areas of storms, falling at higher rates per hour, while at the outer edges rainfall is a bit weaker.Not only can the atmosphere hold 4% more moisture per degree Fahrenheit , but it's what happens in the storm that changes and makes the precipitation come down even more, Leung said.
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