PCIC Research Featured in KnowlEDGE and the Times Colonist

Ongoing research by PCIC Post-Doctoral Scientist Qiaohong Sun examining how warming has affected extreme precipitation was recently featured in UVic’s knowlEDGE and the Times Colonist newspaper. Understanding this connection between anthropogenic climate change and extreme precipitation is important because of the damage that can be caused by extreme precipitation.

In Dr. Sun’s work, conducted as part of the Global Water Futures program, she used 69 years of data, up to 2018, from more than 7000 weather stations and found that one-day rain storms (represented by the annual maxima of one-day precipitation accumulations) intensified at 68 percent of these stations. This intensification was statistically significant at about four times as many stations as would be expected in an unchanging climate. She also found that the percent increase in extreme precipitation was about seven percent for every degree Celsius of warming in global mean surface temperature, which is in line with the increase in the amount of water vapour that air can hold as it warms, as given by basic thermodynamic considerations.

Read the knowlEDGE story.