High-resolution climate model forecasts a wet, turbulent future

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By Paul Voosen, Science. 

Excerpt: For all their usefulness in forecasting global warming, climate models tend to paint the future in the broad strokes of an Impressionist artist. ...Now, a new high-resolution modeling project called MESACLIP, run at great computational expense over the past 5 years, is putting Earth’s future into sharper focus by simulating the churning of the atmosphere and ocean at a level of detail similar to the scale of weather forecasts. The project reveals heightened risks for regions like the Gulf Coast and coastal California, where extreme rainfall could occur far more often than traditionally projected. The trends, published today in Nature Geoscience, show the benefit of high-resolution models, which better capture shifts in wind patterns that lead to the downpours.... 

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