Oregon Public Broadcasting

Here is a long, long range weather forecast according to research presented Tuesday in Portland: The wet areas get wetter.  Dry places get drier. Correspondent Tom Banse explains from the first Pacific Northwest climate science conference.

University of Washington climate scientist Eric Salathé studies extreme precipitation events, or in other words, the downpours that cause flooding.

He says it is not just your imagination that 100-year-floods seem to be happening more frequently. 

Salathé studied the past fifty years of rainfall records for the region and also extrapolated forward using several different climate models. He says "bad luck" can explain the more frequent heavy rainfall observed over the past few decades. 

But looking forward he expects the greenhouse effect to overwhelm "natural variability" in the climate.

Eric Salathé: "It really looks like as the atmosphere gets warmer, the dry places will get drier -- because the warmer atmosphere is able to move water around much more effectively.  It pulls it out of the dry areas and it dumps it into the wet areas much more efficiently."

Pretty much all the big names in global warming research from the Northwest are in Portland for two days to compare notes on regional effects of climate change.