What is it about?
Most of rainfall outside the tropics comes from weather systems called "extratropical cyclones". These are the systems which dominate our daily weather, including extreme events which can cause strong and large-scale flooding. Weather systems are very dynamic systems, where multiple physical processes come together to produce rainfall (or not). As we want to know how our weather might change in the future, we have to check whether the models we use for our predictions are able to produce realistic weather systems. This work uses climate model data and drills down how well those models perform when it comes to producing rainfall from weather systems.
Featured Image
Photo by Dmitry Ant on Unsplash
Why is it important?
We find that models have trouble reproducing the strongest events, in particular in regions along the east coasts of all major continents. Those are the regions where coastal flooding due to weather systems occurs most often, and the model biases we find mean that future predictions of extremes might be underestimated.
Perspectives
This study specifically focuses on rainfall produced by extratropical weather systems. It does not include tropical cyclones or smaller thunderstorms, even if such events can also bring extreme weather. The reason for looking at extratropical cyclones in particular is that such systems can bring large-scale regional flooding (as opposed to smaller scale flash floods from thunderstorms), and having an event-based view on risks related to rainfall and flooding can be helpful when trying to model exposure to extreme weather events. The study agglomerates information from about 70 million individual weather system locations, making statistically meaningful results possible with unprecedented detail.
Dr Martin Jucker
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Global representation of extratropical cyclone precipitation and future trends in CMIP6 models, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, May 2025, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/qj.5010.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
