Latest Precipitation Stories

A Montana State University researcher who analyzed 100 years of data has found a significant link between extreme Montana weather and the ocean temperatures near Peru.Montanans who want to know what to expect from the weather should look to the Pacific Ocean in the fall or maybe find a way to chat with some Peruvian fishermen, according to Joseph Caprio, professor emeritus in MSU's Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences and former Montana State Climatologist.If the average...

Given the UK's obsession with the weather, it would seem obvious that the basic understanding of how low pressure systems evolve has been known for a long time. Instead, some of the biggest storms in the UK's history, such as the Great Storm of October 1987, did not fit this basic understanding.With groundbreaking research, Dr David Schultz, from The University of Manchester believes the way we learn about the weather is wrong and has been wrong for 90 years.Writing in the journal Bulletin of...

Researchers say that aircraft can lead to increased snowfall around the world's major airports. New research shows that numerous private and commercial flights have been drilling holes and canals though clouds, influencing the snow and rainfall below them. The inadvertent cloud-seeding effects are facilitated by the expansion and cooling of air behind a propeller aircraft's engine blades and over aircraft wings when supercooled cloud temperatures are about 14 degrees Fahrenheit and below. ...

Researchers have found that areas near commercial airports sometimes experience a small but measurable increase in rain and snow when aircraft take off and land under certain atmospheric conditions.The new study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is part of ongoing research that focuses on so-called hole punch and canal clouds that form when planes fly through certain mid-level clouds, forcing nearby air to rapidly expand and cool. This causes water droplets to freeze...

Observations major step in improving forecasts of weather extremes such as floods and droughtsMoisture and heat fluctuations from the land surface to the atmosphere form a critical nexus between surface hydrology and atmospheric processes, especially those relevant to rainfall. While current theory has suggested that soil moisture has had a positive impact on precipitation, there have been very few large-scale observations of this. A team of researchers from Columbia Engineering, Geophysical...

Salt is essential to human life. Most people don't know, however, that salt -- in a form nearly the same as the simple table variety -- is just as essential to Earth's ocean, serving as a critical driver of key ocean processes. While ancient Greek soothsayers believed they could foretell the future by reading the patterns in sprinkled salt, today's scientists have learned that they can indeed harness this invaluable mineral to foresee the future -- of Earth's climate.The oracles of modern...

Airborne microorganisms may be responsible for weather events, according to a study that found a high concentration of bacteria at the center of hailstones.Alexander Michaud from Montana State University in Bozeman presented the findings of the study at the 111th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans.Researchers analyzed hailstones that measure over 5 centimeters in diameter (about 2 inches) which were collected on the University campus after a storm in June...

How do intense droughts and extreme flooding coexist together? Welcome to the "New Normal" of regional weather fueled by changes in global climate, Reuters reports."It's a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we're seeing," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University explained.Catastrophic rainstorms and tornado activity in the United States has coincided with prolonged drought, sometimes in the same region, she said, noting...

A sediment core from a South American lake revealed a steady, sharp drop in crucial monsoon rainfall since 1900, leading to the driest conditions in 1,000 years as of 2007 and threatening tropical populations with water shortages, a team from Pitt, Union College, and SUNY-Albany reports in PNAS A 2,300-year climate record University of Pittsburgh researchers recovered from an Andes Mountains lake reveals that as temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rise, the planet's densely populated...

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite has been keeping track of the drenching rainfall that has been occurring in the central U.S. this springtime, and a newly created rain map from that data from April 4 to May 4, 2011 shows those soaked areas.A combination of heavy rains and a large snow melt has put parts of the central U.S. at risk for record flooding this spring with several locations along the Mississippi already at or near record levels. One likely culprit is La Niña....