Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

Article Category

News
Content archived on 2023-03-02

Article available in the following languages:

Human activity influences rainfall patterns, study shows

Human activity is having a major impact on the world's rainfall patterns, according to new research from an international team of scientists. Throughout the 20th century, precipitation patterns across the globe have undergone substantial changes, with northern latitudes exper...

Human activity is having a major impact on the world's rainfall patterns, according to new research from an international team of scientists. Throughout the 20th century, precipitation patterns across the globe have undergone substantial changes, with northern latitudes experiencing increased rain and snowfall, while other regions appear to be getting drier. Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers explain how they compared observed changes in precipitation at different latitudes with the changes simulated by 14 climate models. They demonstrate for the first time that these changes are largely due to human activity. 'We show that anthropogenic forcing has had a detectable influence on observed changes in average precipitation within latitudinal bands, and that these changes cannot be explained by internal climate variability or natural forcing,' the scientists write. For the region lying between 40 and 70° north of the equator - a band which includes Europe, Russia and Canada - two thirds of the observed increase in precipitation can be attributed to human activities, the researchers state. Meanwhile the northern tropics and subtropics (0-30°N), which lie just to the north of the equator, are getting drier, and the scientists attribute a third of this decrease in precipitation to human activities. Regions which lie at this latitude include Mexico, Central America and North Africa. Finally, almost all of the increases in precipitation observed in the southern tropics and subtropics are due to anthropogenic factors. According to the researchers, some of the changes in precipitation can be put down to natural factors such as volcanoes, although their impact is small compared to that of human activity. 'The observed changes, which are larger than estimated from model simulations, may have already had significant effects on ecosystems, agriculture and human health in regions that are sensitive to changes in precipitation, such as the Sahel,' the scientists warn. Previous studies have been unable to detect these effects because they looked at global precipitation as a whole, where drying trends in some regions cancel out increased precipitation elsewhere.

Countries

Canada, Japan, United Kingdom, United States

Related articles