Excerpt:
Each atmospheric river carries the same volume of water as 25 Mississippi Rivers. This is how we can use them to prevent climate disaster.
Atmospheric rivers (AR) are vital to our planet’s weather patterns.
Research indicates that these rivers in the sky cause nearly all of the world’s precipitation.
Efforts in the past few years have helped scientists better understand AR behavior, enabling more accurate weather forecasts.
The rain currently pummeling coastal California is relieving parched crops. It’s also a nuisance that’s delaying flights, uprooting trees, and causing devastating flooding.
Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are to blame. These regions of humid air flow from the tropics into colder climates as strong winds, and condense when they encounter mountains. The warm air rises and cools over elevated land, forming clouds that dump rain and snow onto the earth below. ARs originate in the tropics because warm air holds more moisture.
“Atmospheric rivers are literally rivers in the sky, the rivers of water vapor that transport massive amounts of water in the atmosphere,” Marty Ralph, a hydrometeorologist, tells Popular Mechanics. Ralph is the founding director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, where he has pioneered research on how atmospheric rivers influence the West Coast…
