Thunderstorm complexes, fraught with monsoon floods and large-scale cyclones... they Say all these varieties of bad weather in the tropics will be more frequent as global warming. How?

On this question, and answered Paul O'gorman and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (USA): with increasing temperature by one degree every such event will bring 10% more precipitation.

Tropical storm Fay 2008 (photo minds-eye).

The mechanism of influence of global warming on precipitation is secret: greenhouse gases increase the temperature of the atmosphere, resulting in the intensification of evaporation and growth of air humidity. Computer simulation of this effect in the middle latitudes (above all in the USA and Europe) are roughly equal, and when it comes to the tropics, the model begin to issue a completely different picture.

Mr. O'gorman this explains the relatively low resolution models: on the surface of the planet attacks rather large grid. In the middle latitudes are formed large weather systems, so the results of the models out accurate. And tropical storms are much smaller, and such models are not able to track them.

The researchers focused on satellite observations of rainfall between 30 North and South latitude for twenty years. The data were compared with the testimony 18 climate models.

The most difficult was to understand, when at the annual variability of temperature and, consequently, precipitation affected by El Nino is a warming of the Eastern Pacific ocean, and when global warming. Here they made good use of the model is able to simulate both. They gave similar results, suggesting that the sediments correlated with warming regardless of the cause of the latter.

Hence the above ratio of one degree, and ten percent. Thus it becomes clear that the tropics are reacting to temperature increase of more sensitively than the mid-latitudes. But this does not mean that there will disappear desert will pour already wet regions, and dry areas become drier.

The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Based on the materials of the MIT News.