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Within climate change, how does an increase in temperature imply increased precipitation?
Apologies for the wall-of-text.
Maybe someone can improve my understanding of this process because I don't know if I'm understanding it correctly. By the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, the atmospheric capacity for water vapor increases by around 7% for every degree Celsius that it warms. I've seen this relationship in atmospheric science textbooks, the IPCC reports, peer-reviewed papers, etc. Now to my understanding this is a cause for what is being referred to as "intensification" in the hydrologic cycle through its main driver, precipitation.
The physical basis for this is that the saturation vapor pressure for the water vapor increases and therefore a larger amount of water can be held in the air. Now when you consider precipitation processes, you need moisture, cloud condensation nuclei and a cooling mechanism. We won't consider the availability of CCN here, and we will assume that at least pseudoadiabatic cooling still occurs when you lift a parcel of air. But in order to reach condensation levels (beyond saturation) you need a relative humidity of >100%. This is where I'm confused. If you define RH = e/es, where e is your vapor pressure and es is your saturation vapor pressure, an increased es will decrease the RH, making it required that the parcel be lifted higher and cooled further in order to reach supersaturation (and for condensational growth to cascade to collision-coalescence processes and precipitation to form.)
So wouldn't that really decrease the amount of precipitation, not increase it?
All I can really guess at is that with the increased actual quantity of water in the air (like your mixing ratio or specific humidity), once the precipitation process begins there is more available moisture to keep the process going with continued lifting, as in orographic effect cases or a very strong updraft. This makes sense when many papers assert that while the frequency of small intensity storm events (say <20-50mm depending on where you define your threshold) won't change, larger storms will occur more often, increasing the overall volume of precipitation (hence "intensification.")
If you need more details, I can provide papers and such that illustrate these assumptions but hopefully this outlines it well enough.
Thanks!
Andrew - that's not even close to what was being asked. Try reading the post.
linlyons - I see where you're coming from with the oceanic evaporation, but can it be safely assumed that there's enough of an energy input/drying power to keep that going? Also that makes the assumption that the Bowen ratio stays around 0?
Well when the Bowen ratio is close to zero it implies that the air and water surface are about the same. This is important when considering evaporative loss estimation methods (like energy balance, aerodynamic, Penman, Priestley-Taylor, etc.) that only consider energy inputs but really don't increase significantly with temperature increases (directly at least.)
5 Answers
- Anonymous5 years ago
There needs to be another option… E - None of the above. A changing climate is a consequence of several factors, one of them being temperature. As the temperature changes so too does the climate. To this end, a significant change in temperatures leads to correspondingly large changes in the climate but also, a miniscule temperature change will cause an equally small shift in the climate. You can liken it to a bath full of hot water. If you start adding cold water, at what point does the water in the bath start to cool down? The answer is, it starts to cool the instant the first drop of cold water is added; the more cold water is added the greater the overall effect. Same principle with the climate. If the asker of the original question wants to elicit accurate answers then the question needs quantifying “By how many degrees does the global temperature need to increase in order for X to start changing by Y”, where X is a specific component and Y is a precise outcome. In conclusion, don’t spend any more time looking for the correct answer as there isn’t one.
- 1 decade ago
Hi,
Basically, its the principal of evaporation.
When it gets hot, more water evaporates.
Hence, when condensation takes place,
the clouds form, get heavier.
Heavy clouds lead to rain.
Rain means precipitation.
So more heat, more rain.
hope i hepled
Soph
Source(s): myself - Anonymous1 decade ago
I keep telling you how this has come about, but for those a litle slower than most, here I go again.
A NEW report suggests that it is water vapour, not CO2, that is driving global warming. Since the late 1940s people here have had access to domestic washing machines. Imagine how much laundry these machines do, and compare it to the amount that was done by laundering using traditional methods. Nobody changed their clothes every day as we do now. Wet washing is dried, either by hanging out or in the tumble drier. Trillion of tons of fresh water is released into the atmosphere every week; it must fall as rain somewhere. Excess moisture also changes the way winds blow and air currents circulate around the globe. The more the wind blows, the warmer it becomes.
Add in water vapour from central heating, that's your problem.
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- Anonymous5 years ago
I was wondering the same question myself today
