Tuesday, January 6, 2026
Hello everybody. My name is Beckwith Paul Beckwith and this video is all about the atmospheric river phenomena. So the very nature of atmospheric rivers within the climate system is changing and I want to talk about some of the most recent peer-reviewed scientific papers on atmospheric rivers. So we're seeing various global trends occurring. So atmospheric rivers are basically becoming larger in size. They're becoming more numerous. They're happening more frequently. and they're carrying a lot more water vapor than they used to before. And we're there's new scientific methods to actually detect when an atmospheric river is occurring. The change of atmospheric rivers is not uniform globally. There's various regional patterns occurring. So there's new scientific projects. There's one called the art myip A R TM MIP project which is benchmarking and giving very detailed data sets on when the actual atmospheric rivers are occurring and where they're occurring.
We're also seeing a definite poll shift in the atmospheric river locations of where they're occurring. And this is happening in both hemispheres. It's been happening over the last couple decades. It's mostly attributed to the changes in the ocean, the great marine heat wave events that are occurring and the changing of the large scale wind patterns. And of course the jet stream is correspondingly changing and migrating. I've already talked in the previous video about Hadley cells going to higher latitudes and then in turn feral cells going to higher latitudes and so on. So those are all playing into it.
Basically we're getting changes in precipitation patterns many places because of the changes in the atmospheric rivers. There was a paper in the journal of hydro meteorology in just this year. It looked at over 43,000 atmospheric river events across the western US. And it found that the flooding risk has gone way way up, especially if there's if the soils have been saturated from from previous rainfall events. So then you don't get as much infiltration of water into the soils. So you get more runoff. So the peak stream flows are two to four and a half times greater when you've got this preconditioned wet soils.
3.08
Then there's atmospheric rivers that head down into Antarctica bringing moist air causing increased snowfall in some regions or in low regions on coastal regions even some rainfall. And the atmospheric riverdriven precipitation is expected to increase in Antarctica significantly. And if you look at the, you know, Antarctica is basically a very dry place. And even though the atmospheric rivers are still fairly infrequent in Antarctica, they are increasing in number and they provide the bulk of the precipitation over Antarctica. I mentioned or I haven't mentioned yet, but the ENSO phenomena, the El Nino, the Linia events that occur generally set up patterns.
For example, in La Nina events, you get dry areas. you get very very little rainfall in parts of the southwestern US but sometimes we're getting lots of rainfall in La Nina years in that area of the US because of atmospheric rivers bringing in that water. Also recently there was an event I talked about in a separate video of monsoon rains actually crossing the Himalayan mountain border bringing a lot of rainfall and snow into parts of Tibet you know at the 4,000 5,000 meter level and monsoons are normally operating at about the 1600 to700 meter level.
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SEE ALSO:
Himalayas: monsoon reached Tibetan Plateau- unprecedented hydro meteorological event, Paul Beckwith report at Heating Planet blog https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2025/09/himalayas-monsoon-reached-tibetan.html
AND
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Himalayan Flood videos Related to previous post at Heating Planet Blog https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2025/09/himalayas-monsoon-reached-tibetan.html
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[TRANSCRIPT CONT'D:]
So I mentioned that maybe this is due to atmospheric rivers I think the jury is still out on that since that just happened. But there is a paper that shows how atmospheric rivers are driving unseasonable snow accumulation in the high Andes mountains which is influencing glacier mass balance and then the downstream hydrology of the river systems. Okay. So there's all of these new results. So let me talk a bit about the peer-reviewed science. So I'll go over some of the recent papers and news articles on atmospheric rivers that I've come across. Okay. So most of these are fairly hot off the press type things.
So here's a paper that was just published in May of this year. Open access GRL geophysical research letters characteristics of super atmospheric rivers. So very very high intense atmospheric rivers that are associated with explosive extratropical cyclones over the northern Pacific Ocean.
Okay. So basically the atmospheric rivers are elongated narrow corridors of concentrated moisture in the atmosphere that transport significant amounts of water vapor outside the tropics; and they can cause heavy precipitation because that water vapor is a gas of course, and that gas eventually reaches colder air and condenses and causes clouds and with so much water vapor and moisture in the air, you can get huge rainfall events and flooding.
6.42
These atmospheric rivers are often accompanied by explosive extratropical cyclones- EEC's is the term they use- explosive extratropical cyclones over the oceans. So they looked at 118 very strong atmospheric rivers that are associated with these cyclones over the northern Pacific Ocean. Most of the ARs are associated with strong or super explosive extratropical cyclones. So stronger ARs may lead to more explosive development.
The AR is typically located in the southwest of the cyclone center., and they give a mean value of the top pressure that gives an indication of the height. This is about between three and four three and a half kilometers above the surface where the air pressure is about 700 hexocaps. So they find that water vapor is coming up from lower latitudes providing the water in ARs, atmospheric rivers, but there's also more evaporation from the sea surface. That's another important water vapor source for the ARs.
And as we get these long duration marine heat waves, we get a lot more evaporation from the sea surface. So there's a lot more water contribution to the ARs from these very very hot pools of water. Okay. So there is definitely strong links between the ARS and the cyclones that are occurring. Okay.
So they go into some of the details. So the key points are 78% of super atmospheric rivers very strong the strongest category of atmospheric rivers are associated with strong or super explosive extratropical cyclones.
There's a new term they use called atmospheric river top pressure that gives an idea as to the height above the surface that these atmospheric rivers are carrying the water vapor. They found the mean was about that's 693.51. I like how they say about, right, this is very high precision number anyway. Let's say it's about 700 hexopascal about 3- 3 and a half kilometers above the surface.
The water vapor at low latitudes is a key factor feeding these atmospheric rivers; also evaporation from the sea surface. Okay, so they talk about the history of the cyclones and so on. But let's just look at the data.
Okay. So these are basically this is the moving tracks of these extratropical cyclones, basically the blue lines, and you can see off in the Pacific off the North American continent, you can see the tracks of these things.
This is the atmospheric river frequency of occurrence down here. which is in this region. lots of cyclones generated and then they have a breakdown. They use something called integrated vapor transport to give you an idea. You know, there's different ranges and then when you get up in these ranges, they're very very strong atmospheric rivers.
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And yeah, so they break down the sort of statistics of them. Again, they show regions where these atmospheric rivers occur and the different meteorology, pressure patterns, weather patterns in the data. Okay. So I think that's so basically what's important to get out of this paper is that basically these very strong atmospheric rivers in the North Pacific they're strongly associated with explosive extratropical cyclones. And the explosive extratropical cyclones are basically when the pressure drop in the center of the cyclone exceeds the average rate or is about the average rate of 1 hexopascal per hour pressure drop or 24 hexopascals pressure drop in a 24-hour period. Okay.
So then you call it like an explosively intensifying cyclone and that's very much pushed if you like by these atmospheric rivers.
11.30
So this is I'm this is Earth Null School I'm looking at the E projection here which gives you the sort of map like this and you can pick out these these this is the 250 millibar height of the jet streams. The TPW is total precipitable water. Okay. So higher is the light bluish these regions here and and these are a good indication of the path of these atmospheric rivers from earth null schools. You can see where they are at any given time. A study a few years ago was basically all about ranking atmospheric rivers, right? putting them into a scale like similar to tornado scale or hurricane scale, you know. So, five categories of atmospheric rivers from the weakest to the strongest.
They talk about these rivers in the sky. You know, how research is mostly focused on the west coast of North America and Europe because very high population densities and it's people in those regions that are doing the studies. But this stud was more of a global study ranking the scale of the atmospheric rivers. So they created a scale. They're ranked from one to five like hurricanes, weakest to strongest. Okay? And they could look at the strong ones and correlate them to flood damages and so on. So insured losses due to flood damages increased by a factor of about 10 with every step up in rank of the atmospheric river. So AR5 events cause about about 260 million damage on average to the western US.
13.20
The term atmospheric river was only coined in 1994. Scientists have estimated some 300 million people worldwide are at risk from flooding due to atmospheric rivers which on average transport quantities of water vapor more than double the flow of the Amazon River. So you might ask, "What is the flow of the Amazon River?” I remember that the cumulative flow of all the rivers in the world is about one sphere-drop. Turns out the Amazon is about a fifth of that or about 0.2 sphere drop. The sphere drop being a million cubic meters per second flow rate.
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Googled: Sphere-drop flow rate depends on fluid properties, sphere size/density, and flow regime (Reynolds number), determined by factors like Stokes' Law for slow drops (Re < 1) or complex drag/vortex shedding for faster ones, with key calculations involving drag coefficients (Cd) from correlations like Cd=24/Recap C sub d equals 24 / cap R 𝐶𝑑=24/𝑅𝑒 Stokes, up to Morrison's equation for broader ranges, predicting terminal velocity VTcap V sub cap T𝑉𝑇 where gravity balances drag.
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Let's start at the beginning here. This shows you an atmospheric river coming across into the US. Okay. So there they have new ways to analyze the atmospheric rivers from satellite data and then they can categorize the atmospheric rivers in terms of the ranking you know both in the past and present ones. The mean travel distance was found to be about oh well across 40 years of data studied higher rank storms lasted longer and traveled further than lower rank storms.
Mean travel distance was about 400 miles or 650 kilometers for AR1. And when you go to AR5, the mean travel distance 2,900 miles, 4,700 km. The mean lifetime was about 17 hours for AR1 and 110 hours for AR5. So look at the, you know, the AR5 are huge compared to the lower class ones. and higher rank storms AR4 and five were less common and tended to begin their life cycle closer to the tropics while ending in colder high latitude regions of course with that type of range.
Okay, so this was an interesting study. All the links are in the description.
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[Links from Beckwith]
Science paper: Characteristics of Super Atmospheric Rivers Associated With Explosive Extratropical Cyclones Over the Northern Pacific Ocean
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.c...
Earth Nullschool: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current...
Ranking Atmospheric Rivers: New Study Finds World of Potential
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ranking...
Science paper: PIKART: A Comprehensive Global Catalog of Atmospheric Rivers
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.c...
Atmospheric rivers explain atypical El Niño and La Niña years
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-atmosph...
Science paper: Heresy in ENSO teleconnections: atmospheric rivers as disruptors
of canonical seasonal precipitation anomalies in the Southwestern US
https://link.springer.com/article/10....
Atmospheric rivers are strengthening but are they the scary monster that mainstream media makes out?
https://www.globalwaterforum.org/2025...
Earth's "atmospheric rivers" have shifted, causing big weather changes
https://www.earth.com/news/earths-atm...
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This was the actual paper published in August of this year that was a comprehensive global catalog of atmospheric rivers and it's you know atmospheric rivers and it's the PK that's the PIKART institute for for climate okay which put together the catalog so a catalog of atmospheric IC rivers is a vital resource to advance the study of atmospheric rivers. Many available AR catalogs have a regional extent although only global AR catalogs can record large-scale heterogeneities or changes from one place to another, discontinuities if you like, in the transport AR transport.
So this is a global study that looked at the Pan Institute of Climate atmospheric river trajectories.
So the T is trajectories. That's the the acronym for this covers 84 years 1940 to 2023. High spa space and and time resolution.5 degrees in in in in in latitude longitude six-hour time scales resolved to. So it identifies them all and catalogs them and so on. And it's very important because you know these-
ARs as it says are narrow bands of high moisture in the lower atmosphere along their trajectories. They act as global conveyor belts of water vapor. They're both a blessing and a curse as rainfall from ARS is a source of fresh water. It's also a trigger for disasters.
Okay, so this is an interesting study that just cataloges them, identifies them, finds out where the peak ones are and so on. So let's have a look at the figures. We'll go down and look at the diagrams. They talk about the statistics of how they classify them and so on. And this is a region here for example, you know, so here's a particular date back in 2019 January AR identification. These atmospheric rivers were identified. The shape was kind of sketched out of them and then they looked at the trajectories of them how they moved.
18.20
And so this was two ARs here and then and then they combined. Okay, so they two separate ones and they combined in the space of about six hours. Here's one continuous one and in the space of about another six hours it actually divided into two separate ones. They looked at the trajectory evolutions. They could do this for all the ARs over that time period. So it's a very sort of systematic study here.
Here's a satellite image for example and then the identification in the database of the AR and what it was doing. Okay, so very important to find out how these things are changing over time, the average latitudes of them, how it's changing over time, the integrated vapor transport, ranges for the different atmospheric rivers, so how strong they were. the number of different trajectories and the lifetime the average lifetime of how long they lasted basically.
Okay, so that as you go to much longer lifetimes you get fewer and fewer of the ARs that are that last that long. Okay, so that's the basic idea. So they looked at all the statistics and the they showed bands these are you know so landfall fall falling ARS per year one per year the smallest dots you know 15 per year some areas you get a lot more of them and you can see the trajectories sort of the you know these are kind of the trajectory shown that the probabilities okay globally Okay.
And then statistics rank specific frequency AR events per year across the different continents. Okay. This is so this is the weakest atmospheric river events, the most plentiful going to the strongest ones and then it shows you which areas of the world they're at they're hitting. Okay. So, Oceanana, Australia, right? those two get the most. And then South America, Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and Antarctica. So, you do get them in Antarctica, right? You get about one event per year of the weakest once every two years for category 2 AR. You know, you don't get it's very rare that you get the strongest ones hitting Antarctica, but when you do, watch out.
Okay, so that's interesting data and then they show more statistics of the AR frequency of the different rankings and so on. You know, areas that are most susceptible to atmospheric rivers here, atmospheric river genesis in these areas mostly and then where they end mostly on on on land. Okay, so there's all kinds of interesting data. Atmospheric river events per year, how they're seem to be increasing in year, the different rankings and so on. Integrated vapor transport, you know, one way to measure them and so on. Okay, so very detailed paper on that. this is just you know the flow of the Amazon River. It's about 209,000 cubic meters per second. A million cubic meters per second is a spur drop. So it's about 0.2 spur drop which is about fifth of the overall cumulative flow of all the rivers in the world. And the atmospheric rivers that we're seeing are quite often double that of the flow rate of the Amazon River. Okay. Atmospheric rivers explain atypical El Nino and Leninia years. Okay. So often, you know, certain rainfall patterns and heat patterns occur typically in El Nino years versus Lininoia years, but often times we're getting huge differences in what we would normally expect outside the norm and the atmospheric rivers can explain that. So like a very strong Linia for example, it should be very dry and hot in the US southwest. Sometimes we get torrential rain during la nini years in that region and the explanation is an atmospheric river pokes in and comes through. So they it seems to operate independent of the Enso event.
So that's basically so they give an example. El Nino and La Nina are generally associated with wetter and drier winter conditions in the southwestern United States. So El Nino wetter, Leninia drier. But in 2023 we it should have been drier because of the lania year but it was very wet instead of dry and the reason was the atmospheric rivers that made it one of the the 10th wettest year on record. Okay. So going so they're operating despite El Nino and La nina's pervasive influence on global climate atmospheric rivers don't appear to follow their lead. Atmospheric rivers don't dance to the tune of the Enso. Okay. Okay.
24.00
So there are basically precipitation wild cards in the western US. According to this study, one or two atmospheric rivers can turn a very dry year, a leninia year into a wet year. A weak atmospheric river can turn it into a dry year, a wet year into a dry year and so on. Okay. So these are these are very important factors for trying to figure out what climate is doing. El Nino and Linia typically last between 9 and 12 months, but with climate change warming, as I mentioned last video, sometimes the El Nino look like they're going to go to more multi-year events. Okay. So, so there's you know, and they use the term heretical for you. Basically, they said that about 32% of the ENSO years analyzed were what they termed heretical, meaning they went against the normal patterns of precipitation expected from El Nino and Lan Ninia. Of those years, the atmospheric rivers explained what happened in about 70% of them.
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[More Links from Beckwith]
et Soils Increase Flooding During Atmospheric River Storms
https://www.dri.edu/wet-soils-increas...
Science paper: Wet Antecedent Soil Moisture Increases Atmospheric River Streamflow Magnitudes Nonlinearly
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/jou...
Antarctic atmospheric rivers, supercharged by climate change, expected to double by 2100
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-antarct...
Science paper: Rising atmospheric moisture escalates the future impact of atmospheric rivers
in the Antarctic climate system
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4324…
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So, it kind of overrides the ENSO situation. And then there is a peer-reviewed paper on that. I'm not going to go into great details. I don't like the terms that they're using heretical and heresy but the the idea is that the ENSO the ENSO behavior is being we're not getting what we would expect with normal ENSO in many places and the reason is the atmospheric rivers are disruptors and this is especially this paper is about the anomalies of precipitation in the southwestern US. Okay. So, in spite of forecast for anomalous dryness based on the Alinia signal, water years 2011, 17, and 2023 brought copious precipitation to California and the southwestern United States.
Although the ENSO is the main source of seasonal precipitation predictability, the atmospheric river activity produced the unexpected regional wet wetness in each of these water years here, which made them a lot wetter than you would expect from the ENSO predictions. So they studied that and they found that it 70% of the explanation was due to these atmospheric rivers that were occurring.
So, I don't think I'll go into the details. They just show you these are precipitation anomalies during wet year 2023. so that you can see the different months October, November, December, January, February, March, April, November, December, January, and so on. the precipitation anomalies across this region much much more water and rainfall than you would expect based on the El Nino. Okay, so interesting phenomena.
27.05
Atmospheric rivers are strengthening, but are they the scary monster that mainstream media makes out? So this is an interesting article from July of this year. This is a good explanation of atmospheric rivers and where the term has come from. It's been around for a while and, you know, how it's basically, changing in a changing climate. Atmospheric rivers, they've got a couple interesting figures here of how atmospheric rivers are on the rise. And this was the global area ratio percentage of earth's surface area based on the globe and based on just the land and how the atmospheric rivers are changing and what they're doing. So it's a good sort of primer on what's going on.
So let's move on to some of the other articles and peer-reviewed papers. Earth's atmospheric rivers have shifted causing big weather changes. Okay, so they talk about these narrow bands of moisture flowing through the air right above your head. These atmospheric rivers can carry more water than the Amazon River, but they're carrying not water, right? They're contain water vapor, not liquid water. Okay? So, it's water vapor, which is a gas. Okay. And when they when these atmospheric rivers reach land, they slow down. The the water vapor condenses into clouds and the clouds can release large amounts of rain or or snow. One strong atmospheric river can bury the Sierra Nevada mountain range and several feet of snow can rapidly refill depleted reservoirs, but can also cause floods that damage and destroy neighborhoods.
So, the patterns are shifting. Okay. Atmospheric rivers are no longer traveling along their historical paths. They're shifting towards both poles and that change wasn't anticipated. They're going forward in both poles bringing heavy rain and storms to higher latitudes which can reshape precipitation patterns globally. Okay. And so this study is all about looking at that. All these ads are really annoying. okay. Okay.
So let's have a look at the paper. Okay. This shows some of the connections tropical rain belt expansion la ninia conditions waters cooler here and how the ars are shifting towards the pole and so on. Okay. So, of course, climate change compounds the risk of ARS because warmer air holds more water vapor, right?
For every degree rise in temperature, you get 7% more water vapor. So, the atmospheric rivers can carry more moisture. And secondly, their typical paths are changing. So, they're moving towards the pole. So, some regions receive fewer storms, but those events are more intense when they do occur. Other regions experience storms much more frequently than before. Okay, so it's having an important effect on the climate.
So this is a really good paper. There's been a global pole shift of atmospheric rivers. Okay, so again all the links are in the description. This is open source. Atmospheric rivers are key agents in distributing extratropical precipitation and transporting moisture to the poles. Okay, it's a way to bring moisture to the poles. Climate models forced by historical anthropogenic forcing suggest an increase in AR activity in the exotropics. But the reanalysis looking at the data has indicated we've had a six degree to 10 degree latitude forward shift of ARS during boreal winter in both hemispheres. In the past four decades, we've had a big rise of atmospheric rivers around 50 degrees north and 50 degrees south. And we've had a big decrease of atmospheric rivers along 30° north and 30° south. They find that sea surface temperature variability in the tropical eastern Pacific has been one of the keys to driving this global shift of the AR. Okay. Okay.
And there's also effects from the ENSO. It talks here. okay. So let's actually have a look at the data because this is very important stuff. This is the zonal mean atmospheric river frequency trend days per month per decade. and this is European data and some other data. And you can see quite different occurrences. There's different peaks at different regions. Some regions are losing ars right at lower latitudes and there's a huge shift and increase at higher latitudes. Okay. So this is a trend. We're getting fewer of them at these latitudes and more of them at higher latitudes. Okay. So it's a very very interesting study very significant result.
These are some other different analyses where this is the air frequency decreasing at lower latitudes increasing at higher latitudes in both the northern and southern hemisphere. okay. and then they show this they show this is kind of the mechanism that they're looking at. especially during leninas if you get a sea surface temperature cooling here then you get stronger walker circulation. you get an expansion of the tropical belt basically a highly cell expansion and so you get higher pressure in these regions and this you get AR shifting towards the pole in both the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere. and then there's a lot more maps showing more more of the details. Okay. So what they're showing is the low in this study we show low frequency variability of ENSO strengthens subtropical high pressures on both sides of the tropics. So we get an intensification of royal winter AR frequency in the mid latitudes along 50 to 60 north and 50 to 60 south and a diminishing AR frequency around 30 north and 30 south. Okay, so this has a huge impact on water distribution around the planet.
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This is an article about the wet soils. So if the soils are wet already and then you get an atmospheric river of course the water can't infiltrate into the soils so the flooding becomes a lot worse and there's a paper here that was just published in June of this year that talks about this so atmospheric rivers drive most riverine floods on the US west coast but if you estimate the flood risk based solely on AR intensity and duration is challenging because the previous conditioning of the soils is important and the watershed and so on. So they looked at they call it anticessent soil moisture ASM conditions. So when the soil is already moist and the atmospheric river comes along you get a lot more water flow in the streams. In fact, maximum stream flow is two to four and a half times larger when you've got wet soils beforehand. So they show this in a very detailed way in this in this particular study very detailed you know these the AR frequencies in different places the numbers of storms along the west coast and the stream flows you know how they increase and and you get more and more flooding okay so that's what that's all about.
36.10
This paper: Antarctic Atmospheric rivers supercharged by climate change are expected to double by 2100. This was a paper from June. Okay, so this is a big deal. Although you know their time frame may be a bit suspect, but climate change is expected to dramatically increase the frequency and intensity of atmospheric rivers over Antarctica. That's long narrow plumes of warm moist air that can travel thousands of kilometers and deliver intense precipitation. Okay. So they're expecting them to greatly increase over time. So this is bringing extreme weather events.
So let's just have a look at the peer-reviewed paper. Rising atmospheric moisture escalates the future impact of atmospheric rivers in the Antarctic climate system. Despite their relative rarity, atmospheric rivers are key contributors to the surface mass balance of Antarctica. But the future role of atmospheric rivers and modulating Antarctic sea level contributions is a major area of uncertainty. Okay. So they found that there would be a doubling of atmospheric river frequencies in the future and two and a half times increase in precipitation due to these atmospheric rivers and they looked at how that would affect the changes in Antarctica. So future simulations for Antarctic mass balance project mass losses of up to 150 cm. So 1.5 meters sea level rise equivalent by 2100 from Antarctica. So they relate it to sea level rise. They talk about the you know up to 40% of the net precipitation on Antarctica. 70% of the variability is driven by synoptic scale extreme events.
And many of these events are occurring because of atmospheric rivers hitting Antarctica. So I like this. Despite occurring only 1% of the time at any given location along the Antarctic coastline, these narrow elongated filaments of extreme water vapor transport or ARS are associated with 13% of the annual total precipitation and 35% of the variability in precipitation over Antarctica. Okay. Okay. And they talk about the Clausius Clapperon equation, the increase of atmospheric moisture 7% for every degrees Celsius rise in temperature and so on. And then they show the integrated water vapor which is the total water vapor hitting Antarctica future versus present. So large rises expected with more and more atmospheric rivers impacting Antarctica. Okay, so this is again very important study. Atmospheric river frequency, days per year, some areas less of them, other areas significantly more of them. Okay, so there's different regional differences and so on. Okay, so another very important study, we think of Antarctica, we don't really think of atmospheric rivers, but that thinking should probably change. atmospheric rivers may be diminishing on the west coast and surging on the east coast. Okay, so this is an interesting study that talks about the you know why you know it's not just a west coast phenomena atmospheric rivers.
So one that hit New England at the end of 2024 left over 80,000 homes without electricity inundated many places. more than three quarters of all atmospheric river studies focus either on the western US or western Europe, right? But we're getting these- they're becoming more impactful. This is a trend in wintertime daily precipitation.
East coast atmospheric river rainfall is on the rise and it's over a 40-year time period. You can see the changes in precipitation, average daily precipitation, millimeters per decade, getting more and more rainfall on the east coast over time from more and more of these atmospheric rivers. Okay, so that's an interesting study. It's not just on the west coast., and this is a peer-reviewed paper that talks about these changes. And I'm not going to go into the details, but it again it's open source and I'll I'll give you the link to this. So it looks at atmospheric rivers in the northern hemisphere. It looks at the historical trends and how there's actually more on the east coast now than there was before. this is a paper about unseasonal atmospheric river drives anomalous summer snow accumulation on glaciers in the subtropical Andes. Okay. Okay, so these atmospheric rivers can be very powerful advection of moisture and when it hits a geographical obstacle like a mountain like the Andes, the moisture is driven up high and then eventually condenses out into water droplets, ice crystals, snow or water depending on the altitude. And it's putting a lot of snow on glaciers in the Andes. And as I mentioned in a separate video, it's actually crossed the Himalayan border into putting rain and snow into Tibet. Okay. So this is a very important study. So a lot of moisture can be brought up to very high altitudes where it can fall and affect places where that didn't get that precipitation before.
Okay. So this is the example from the Andes. I'm sure there'll be a paper soon, excuse me, about the more papers on the on the rainfall events that we saw where where the monsoon actually got pushed up by atmospheric rivers and combination of up and crossed the Himalayan boundary into very high altitudes in Tibet. And this is looking at there's another paper here on the future projections of East Asian atmospheric rivers in high resolution climate models.
So you know atmospheric rivers play a critical role in precipitation in East Asia during the East Asian summer monsoon. And so this is directly related to the you know I showed you data recently of the of what we think is an AR interacting with the monsoon pushing that water vapor up very very high into the Himalayas. So this is a study that actually anticipates that sort of thing happening. Okay. So I'll put the link here and response of atmospheric river width and intensity to aqua planet warming. Aqua planet I guess that's called they didn't want to say earth warming right a water planet. another paper that came out looking at these the distributions and so on of these atmospheric rivers and this is behind a pay wall but I just want to bring it to your attention atmospheric rivers cause warm winters and extreme heat events and there's a paper on how do we measure or observe these atmospheric rivers this is a physics paper from last year. We can use global navigation satellite system. This is like the GPS systems on satellites. So networks using something called radio occultation to measure observe these atmospheric rivers. And this paper here is also good reference on the changing nature of atmospheric rivers, right? how they're actually, you know, these atmospheric rivers,, they're intensifying because warmer air can hold more moisture. ARS have already become more frequent, larger, and moisture between 1980 to 2023 over 40 that 43-year time frame. Extreme AR conditions. So, the category 5 ARS have intensified at a faster rate than the mean. Okay, so this is sort of a you know sort of an important study that that documents these things. Let's just quickly look at some of the figures and stuff. I think I Okay, I've shown some of these figures in in previous paper. This one these two here in particular. So this is a peer-reviewed paper where where these these images came from. Okay. So different trends in the AR and and so on. Okay. So, and I think I've covered that in a separate video. And this is a recent PowerPoint presentation that compares atmospheric rivers of water year 2025., so they call it water year. It includes the the the rainy season from last year to this year up until the summer, I guess. You know, mostly winter. But these are atmospheric rivers that are hitting the west coast. And then they had they show where they are and there's very few further south here.
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[More links from Beckwith]
Atmospheric Rivers May be Diminishing on the West Coast and Surging in the East, Study Finds
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09...
Science paper: Contrasting historical trends of atmospheric rivers in the Northern Hemisphere
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4161...
Science paper: An unseasonal atmospheric river drives anomalous summer snow accumulation on glaciers of the subtropical Andes
https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/19...
Science paper: Future projection of East Asian atmospheric rivers in high-resolution
climate models https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Science paper: The Changing Nature of Atmospheric Rivers
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/jou...
Atmospheric Rivers raise temperatures: https://fyfluiddynamics.com/2025/04/a…
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Tale of two Californians, very very wet, very very dry conditions. they compare water year 2025 to water year 2024, you know, in terms of each atmosphere river that hits and so on. So, lots of detail there specifically on on on California. And this is just a reminder, atmospheric rivers raise temperatures. This is showing an atmospheric river coming onto the west coast, total precipitable water vapor. so they carry and deposit water, large amounts. They looked at 43 years worth of data. The atmospheric rivers also bring unusually warm temperatures. So surface temperatures near an atmospheric river climb to as high as 15° C above the typical. Right? Why is this happening? Because when rising water vapor meets cooler air, it condenses into liquids, but it releases and it releases lots of warm air. Right? the latent heat effect. Okay, the the the energy content of the vapor is much greater than that of the liquid. So when you turn from vapor to liquid, you get a release of this latent heat which drives cape convective available potential energy drives storms, but it also causes the heating. Okay, so that's what that article is about. And this is an this is a Noah site talking about predictable patterns of seasonal seasonal atmospheric river variability over North America during the winter. So these things are being studied u in great detail because they do carry a lot more moisture and have a lot more impact on places than we thought previously. So thank you for listening. Please consider going to my website paulbeckwith.net and donating to PayPal to support my research and videos. Thanks for listening. Bye for now. *****
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