Study Finds More Extreme Storms Ahead for California

New technique predicts frequency of heavy precipitation with global warming.

MIT scientists have found that ... extreme precipitation events in California should become more frequent as the Earth’s climate warms over this century.  The researchers developed a new technique that predicts the frequency of local, extreme rainfall events by identifying telltale large-scale patterns in atmospheric data.  For California, they calculated that, if the world’s average temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, the state will experience three more extreme precipitation events than the current average, per year.

The researchers, who have published their results in the Journal of Climate, say their technique significantly reduces the uncertainty of extreme storm predictions made by standard climate models.

“One of the struggles is, coarse climate models produce a wide range of outcomes. [Rainfall] can increase or decrease,” says Adam Schlosser, senior research scientist in MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “What our method tells you is, for California, we’re very confident that [heavy precipitation] will increase by the end of the century.”

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