Rain Comes to the Arctic, With a Cascade of Troubling Changes eos.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eos.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Rain used to be rare in the Arctic, but as the region warms, so-called “rain-on-snow events” are becoming more common. The rains accelerate ice loss, trigger flooding, landslides, and avalanches, and create problems for wildlife and the Indigenous people who depend on them.
Groundbreaking research looks into the role of summer rainfall in the Canadian High Arctic
A team of researchers, including Queen’s University’s Scott Lamoureux and Melissa Lafrenière, Professors in the Department of Geography and Planning, have published a study in Nature Communications that examines the importance of summer rainfall in High Arctic settings. The study, Emerging Dominance of Summer Rainfall Driving High Arctic Terrestrial-Aquatic Connectivity, presents a new analysis of a long-term hydrological, meteorological, and water quality data set from the Queen’s-led Cape Bounty Arctic Watershed Observatory in Nunavut.
The work documents a shift in the importance of summer rainfall in this High Arctic setting, and how the resulting shift in the timing of river flow, along with the erosive power of rainfall runoff vs snowmelt runoff drive important changes in the amounts of carbon and mineral loads carried by Arctic rivers.