Climate change forecast: More intense deluges and downpours Down Under.
Dorothy Mackellar’s now classic view of Australia as a country of droughts and flooding rains is likely to get a further boost with just a 2°C rise in global warming.
New findings from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, published in Nature Climate Change, have pointed to strong increases in rainfall during extreme precipitation events in Australia as a result of global warming.
This paper reveals that with just a rise of 2°C in global average temperatures, Australia will see a 11.3-30% intensification in rainfall from extreme precipitation events.
Greater average humidity led to a sharper increase in the intense rainfall events.
But even in areas where average humidity and rainfall was lower, suggesting increasing aridity, the most extreme rainfall events still saw an 11.3% increase in total rainfall with 2°C of global warming.
Australia’s infrastructure will need to be prepared to adapt to these more extreme rainfall events even if we act to moderate the global temperature rise to within 2°C."
The paper also went beyond the 2°C international Paris Agreement target, looking at what would happen with a 4°C rise in global temperature, which is a likely outcome based on current increases in the rate of carbon emissions.
ScienceDaily, 17 January 2017.
Retrieved April 17, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170117140252.htm University of New South Wales.