Issues for assessing impacts of climate change on precipitation

What is it about?

Current climate models suggest that global warming will result in more frequent extreme hydrological events (floods and droughts). These results, however, must be tempered with the fact that current climate models do not realistically represent many of the processes important to the formation of clouds and precipitation at various time and space scales. For instance, the diurnal cycle of precipitation is poorly represented in most climate models. The proper representation of precipitation is a major challenge to global climate models, which typically only resolve processes at 200- to 400-km scales, and is a focus of current scientific research.

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Why is it important?

This paper discusses the issues and why we think we know how precipitation is actually affected by climate change, at least qualitatively.