Record-Breaking Heavy Rainfall Events Increased Under Global Warming

Heavy rainfall events setting ever new records have been increasing strikingly in the past thirty years.  While before 1980, multi-decadal fluctuations in extreme rainfall events are explained by natural variability, a team of scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research detected a clear upward trend in the past few decades towards more unprecedented daily rainfall events.

They find the worldwide increase to be consistent with rising global temperatures which are caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.  Short-term torrential rains can lead to high-impact floodings.

Extreme rainfall in Pakistan 2010 caused devastating flooding which killed hundreds and lead to a cholera outbreak.  Other examples of record-breaking precipitation events in the period studied include rainstorms in Texas in the US, 2010, which caused dozens of flash-floods. And no less than three so-called 'once-in-a-century' flooding events in Germany all happened in just a couple of years, starting 1997.  "In all of these places, the amount of rain pouring down in one day broke local records - and while each of these individual events has been caused by a number of different factors, we find a clear overall upward trend for these unprecedented hazards", says lead-author Jascha Lehmann.

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