Extreme Hurricane Rainfall Expected to Increase in a Warmer World - Dr. Jeff Masters

[malaise]

https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/extreme-hurricane-rainfall-expected-increase-warmer-world
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Hurricane Harvey of August 2017 brought the greatest rainfall event ever recorded in the U.S. by a tropical cyclone—an astonishing 60.58” in Nederland, Texas. The resulting flood disaster was the second costliest weather-related disaster in U.S. and world history--$125 billion, according to NOAA. Naturally, this gave rise to questions about whether the rains were made worse by global warming, and how we might expect tropical cyclone rainfall to change in a warming climate.

One of the more confident predictions hurricane scientists can make on the future of hurricanes in a warmer climate is that they will dump heavier rains, due to increased moisture in the atmosphere. There is a growing body of literature showing that heavy precipitation events of all kinds—including those from tropical cyclones (which include all hurricanes, tropical storms, and tropical depressions)—have already grown more common. Four papers in the past year have been published that found that human-caused global warming significantly increased the odds of the heavy rains like Hurricane Harvey brought to Texas.

In this post, we take a comprehensive look at what the published peer-reviewed science says on the expected increase in heavy rains from tropical cyclones in a warmer world.
Little research has been done on observed tropical cyclone precipitation changes

A 2015 assessment by eleven hurricane scientists, Tropical cyclones and climate change, concluded that for the globe, “a detectable change in tropical cyclone-related rainfall has not been established by existing studies.” However, that paper explained that there have not been any global studies looking at the issue, and did not cite the three U.S.-based studies on the issue that had been done before 2015:

Groisman et al. (2004), Contemporary Changes of the Hydrological Cycle over the Contiguous United States: Trends Derived from In Situ Observation, found that the total number of daily rainfall events exceeding two inches associated with tropical cyclones in the Southeast U.S. from 1900 – 2000 did not change significantly.

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Lots more at link