By Claire Barber , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: SEATTLE—In December 2025, torrential rains and catastrophic flooding hit western Washington. High precipitation levels, combined with the warmest December on record for the state, meant that many mountainous areas received rain rather than snow, leading to a deluge that broke through two levees and caused an estimated $182 million in damages to public infrastructure. The lack of snowpack also led to drought later in the summer of 2026. A draft legislative report and forecast , released this month by the Washington State Department of Ecology, reveals that changing precipitation patterns, like those seen in December 2025, are primed to leave their mark across the state as more snow falls as rain, particularly impacting eastern Washington—a reality that is far too familiar for agricultural communities in the region....  Full article at https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22072026/washington-state-winter-rains-leads-to-increased-dr...

By Corey S. Lesk & Justin S. Mankin , Science.  Summary: ...When scientists analyzed global precipitation records from 1980 to 2022, they found that annual rainfall in much of the world has become more concentrated , leading to more intense storms interspersed with longer dry spells. ...soil can only soak up so much water at once. What’s left collects on the surface, where it more readily evaporates, leaving less water available for ecosystems even if overall precipitation increases. “ Rainfall concentration is essentially asking the land to drink from a firehose ,” senior study author Justin Mankin said.... Using an economic tool typically used to measure wealth inequality, the researchers determined that the United States west of the Mississippi and South America’s Amazon River basin experienced particularly high levels of rain consolidation over the past 4 decades. In contrast, precipitation has become more distributed in the Arctic, Northern Europe, and Canada—changes that...

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....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/high-resolution-climate-model-forecasts-wet-turbulent-future .

By Saima May Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Africa is a source of uncertainty in carbon cycle calculations. By some estimates, the continent’s landscapes emit 2.1 billion tons more carbon dioxide than they take up each year—about equal to 1.5 times the annual emissions from  coal-fired power plants . But other estimates are almost the complete opposite, suggesting that the continent’s copious plant matter takes up 2.0 billion more tons of carbon dioxide per year than it releases. This uncertainty exists in part because the amount of carbon Africa takes up and emits  varies greatly  from year to year and partly because there is a dearth of available surface observations across the continent.  Yun et al.   investigated the reason for these fluctuations by applying a suite of atmospheric transport models to data from the  Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2  (OCO-2).... By filling a critical observational gap over Africa, the OCO-...