With a warmer climate creating more humid conditions in the Northeast, extreme precipitation events—defined as about 1.5 or more inches of heavy rainfall or melted snowfall in a day—are projected to increase in the Northeast by 52% by the end of the century, according to a new Dartmouth study.
With a warmer climate creating more humid conditions in the Northeast, extreme precipitation events—defined as about 1.5 or more inches of heavy rainfall or melted snowfall in a day—are projected to increase in the Northeast by 52% by the end of the century, according to a new Dartmouth study.
The findings are published in Climatic Change.
« As climate change brings warmer temperatures, you have more water vapor in the atmosphere, which creates the right conditions for extreme precipitation, » says first author Christopher J. Picard ’23, an earth sciences major and undergraduate researcher in the Applied Hydroclimatology Group at Dartmouth.
« Our findings show that this increase in extreme precipitation will be primarily driven by more frequent heavy rainfall events, not by the intensity of such events, » says Picard. « In other words, we expect a large increase in the number of extreme precipitation days, and a smaller increase in the amount of rain on each extreme precipitation day.
