ArticleScience advances2017
Human-induced changes in the distribution of rainfall.
Article in Science advances, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Insect herbivores reduce plant biomass loss and enhance plant recovery in response to extreme drought.Ecology · 2026Article
- Baobab isotope records and rainfall forcing in Southwest Madagascar over the last 700 years.PloS one · 2026Article
- Persistent humid climate favored the Qin and Western Han Dynasties in China around 2,200 y ago.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The strength, position, and width changes of the intertropical convergence zone since the Last Glacial Maximum.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Aerosols overtake greenhouse gases causing a warmer climate and more weather extremes toward carbon neutrality.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Terrestrial amplification of past, present, and future climate change.Science advances · 2023Article
- Temporal dynamics of range expander and congeneric native plant responses during and after extreme drought events.Ecological monographs · 2022Article
- Intra-annual growing season climate variability drives the community intra-annual stability of a temperate grassland by altering intra-annual species asynchrony and richness in Inner Mongolia, China.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Associations between long-term drought and diarrhea among children under five in low- and middle-income countries.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Interhemispheric antiphasing of neotropical precipitation during the past millennium.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Species richness and asynchrony maintain the stability of primary productivity against seasonal climatic variability.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Article
- Short-term effects of rainfall on childhood hand, foot and mouth disease and related spatial heterogeneity: evidence from 143 cities in mainland China.BMC public health · 2020Article
- An observation-constrained assessment of the climate sensitivity and future trajectories of wetland methane emissions.Science advances · 2020Article
- A low-cost hydrologic observatory for monitoring the water balance of small lakes.Environmental monitoring and assessment · 2019Article
- Western U.S. lake expansions during Heinrich stadials linked to Pacific Hadley circulation.Science advances · 2018Article
- Climate variability decreases species richness and community stability in a temperate grassland.Oecologia · 2018Article
- Lake Tauca highstand (Heinrich Stadial 1a) driven by a southward shift of the Bolivian High.Science advances · 2018Article
- South American monsoon response to iceberg discharge in the North Atlantic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A likely consequence of global warming will be the redistribution of Earth's rain belts, affecting water availability for many of Earth's inhabitants. We consider three ways in which planetary warming might influence the global distribution of precipitation. The first possibility is that rainfall in the tropics will increase and that the subtropics and mid-latitudes will become more arid. A second possibility is that Earth's thermal equator, around which the planet's rain belts and dry zones are organized, will migrate northward. This northward shift will be a consequence of the Northern Hemisphere, with its large continental area, warming faster than the Southern Hemisphere, with its large oceanic area. A third possibility is that both of these scenarios will play out simultaneously. We review paleoclimate evidence suggesting that (i) the middle latitudes were wetter during the last glacial maximum, (ii) a northward shift of the thermal equator attended the abrupt Bølling-Allerød climatic transition ~14.6 thousand years ago, and (iii) a southward shift occurred during the more recent Little Ice Age. We also inspect trends in seasonal surface heating between the hemispheres over the past several decades. From these clues, we predict that there will be a seasonally dependent response in rainfall patterns to global warming. During boreal summer, in which the rate of recent warming has been relatively uniform between the hemispheres, wet areas will get wetter and dry regions will become drier. During boreal winter, rain belts and drylands will expand northward in response to differential heating between the hemispheres.
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Registered trials
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