Climate change seriously affected amount of precipitation on our planet

By Alimat Aliyeva

Climate change has seriously affected precipitation patterns around the world. Scientists said that new weather conditions could intensify typhoons and other tropical storms, Azernews reports.

Taiwan, the Philippines, and then China faced the strongest typhoon of the year this week, as wind speeds increased to 227 kilometers per hour, schools, businesses and financial exchanges were closed. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated along China's east coast.

Scientists note that more intense tropical storms are part of the growing phenomenon of extreme weather caused by higher temperatures. Researchers led by Zhang Wenxia of the Chinese Academy of Sciences studied historical meteorological data and found that about 75 percent of the world's land area has changed precipitation patterns or has large differences between wet and dry weather.

Rising temperatures have increased the ability of the atmosphere to retain moisture, leading to wider fluctuations in precipitation, the researchers say in a paper published in the journal Science.

Stephen Sherwood, a scientist at the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Center, said variability has increased in most places, including Australia, which means longer wet and dry periods. According to him, as global warming continues, it will lead to an increase in droughts and floods.

Scientists believe that climate change is also changing the behavior of tropical storms, including typhoons, making them smaller but more powerful. Thus, the increased water vapor content in the atmosphere causes more extreme hydrological phenomena.
Sachi Canada, a researcher at Japan's Nagoya University, says that although it is difficult to link individual weather events to climate change, models predict that global warming is intensifying typhoons. He adds that the warming of the sea surface is a favorable condition for the development of tropical cyclones.

In a climate change report released this month, China said the number of typhoons in the Northwest Pacific and the South China Sea has decreased significantly since the 1990s, but has become stronger. Taiwan also said in a climate change report released in June that climate change could reduce the total number of typhoons in the region while making each one more severe.

Feng Xianbo, a tropical cyclone researcher at the University of Reading, noted that the decrease in the number of typhoons is due to uneven warming of the oceans; temperatures are rising faster in the western Pacific than in the east. The capacity of water vapor in the lower atmosphere is expected to increase by 7 percent for every degree of temperature increase and by 40 percent for every degree of precipitation increase as a result of tropical cyclones in the United States.