Mapping the Future of Extreme Weather Events

"A new study by researchers from MIT and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich shows that the most extreme rain events in most regions of the world will increase in intensity by 3 to 15 percent, depending on region, for every degree Celsius that the planet warms," reports Jennifer Chu for the MIT News Office.

"If global average temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius over the next hundred years, as many climate models predict given relatively high CO2 emissions, much of North America and Europe would experience increases in the intensity of extreme rainfall of roughly 25 percent," adds Chu.

So far, climate modeling has shown extreme weather as a global trend, but the new study begins to reduce the scale of the weather predictions, at the level of continents and even smaller. In doing so, researchers "found that, overall, it was the changes in winds, and not water vapor, that determined the region-to-region variations in the change in extreme rain intensity."

The study was published yesterday in the Nature Climate Change journal.