Measuring how much water falls from the sky is more complicated than it seems. To improve measurements, researchers are looking at umbrellas, hydrophones, and gamma ray detectors.
rain
Posted inNews
Atacama’s Past Rainfall Followed Pacific Sea Temperature
This is the first paleoclimate record of precipitation near Atacama’s hyperarid core and suggests that its moisture source is different from that of the Andes.
Posted inNews
Take Weather Prediction with a Grain of Salt and It Gets Better
Sea surface salinity is starting to rival other methods for seasonal rain forecasting.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Precipitation in the Tropics: A New View
The first study to simultaneously investigate precipitation and cloud structures in tropical weather systems concludes observation systems significantly overestimate the height of raining clouds.
Posted inNews
Atacama Desert’s Unprecedented Rains Are Lethal to Microbes
Rainfall in the driest parts of Chile’s Atacama Desert in 2017 resulted in hypersaline lagoons that killed the majority of microbes adapted to millions of years of arid conditions.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
The Acid Tongue of Climate Change Strikes Our Streams
Clear air policies have led to dramatic reductions in acid rain and improved ecosystem health, but it now appears that climate change could counteract those gains.
Posted inScience Updates
How Landslides Become Disasters
A new modeling platform, tested on two recent natural disasters, simulates conditions that dump landslide debris into rain-swollen rivers, often causing more damage than the landslides themselves.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Effects of Acid Rain, Climate Change on Freshwater Lakes
New England lakes weathered years of acid rain. A new study tracks how they are faring after 30 years of regulation and how climate change factors into the equation.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
A Near-Real-Time Tool to Characterize Global Landslide Hazards
By fusing susceptibility information with precipitation data, a new model generates “nowcasts” to predict the potential for rainfall-triggered landslides in steep terrain between 50°N and 50°S.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Fossilized Caribbean Corals Reveal Ancient Summer Rains
Isotope records and climate modeling suggest that the rainy Intertropical Convergence Zone expanded northward into the southern Caribbean during a warm interglacial period about 125,000 years ago.