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2017 ; 3
(5
): e1600871
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Human-induced changes in the distribution of rainfall
#MMPMID28580418
Putnam AE
; Broecker WS
Sci Adv
2017[May]; 3
(5
): e1600871
PMID28580418
show ga
A likely consequence of global warming will be the redistribution of Earth's rain
belts, affecting water availability for many of Earth's inhabitants. We consider
three ways in which planetary warming might influence the global distribution of
precipitation. The first possibility is that rainfall in the tropics will
increase and that the subtropics and mid-latitudes will become more arid. A
second possibility is that Earth's thermal equator, around which the planet's
rain belts and dry zones are organized, will migrate northward. This northward
shift will be a consequence of the Northern Hemisphere, with its large
continental area, warming faster than the Southern Hemisphere, with its large
oceanic area. A third possibility is that both of these scenarios will play out
simultaneously. We review paleoclimate evidence suggesting that (i) the middle
latitudes were wetter during the last glacial maximum, (ii) a northward shift of
the thermal equator attended the abrupt Bølling-Allerød climatic transition ~14.6
thousand years ago, and (iii) a southward shift occurred during the more recent
Little Ice Age. We also inspect trends in seasonal surface heating between the
hemispheres over the past several decades. From these clues, we predict that
there will be a seasonally dependent response in rainfall patterns to global
warming. During boreal summer, in which the rate of recent warming has been
relatively uniform between the hemispheres, wet areas will get wetter and dry
regions will become drier. During boreal winter, rain belts and drylands will
expand northward in response to differential heating between the hemispheres.