New Study Reflects Heavier Rainfall May Be Region's "New Normal"

"Intense rainfall events, like the one that triggered flash floods throughout the region and a mudslide in southern Vermont on Monday, have become much more common in the last 20 years, according to researchers at Dartmouth College.

"Though the jury is still out on whether climate change is behind the trend, the findings, which were published last month, do suggest that what we think of as 100-year flood events might actually be much more likely to happen than conventional wisdom suggests, said Jonathan Winter, who joined Dartmouth colleagues Huanping Huang and Erich Osterberg on the research team.

Winter found that intense rainfalls - generally thought of as 2 or more inches of precipitation in a 24-hour period - are 53 percent more likely to happen than they were before the mid-1990s. . . .

"Winters and his colleagues were surprised when they analyzed rainfall data at 116 weather stations throughout the Northeast between 1901 and 2014.

"Instead of seeing a slow and steady increase in storm events, they found a dramatic change that happened all at once - in 1996.

"The study was published in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Hydrometeorology by the team, which included Dartmouth’s departments of Earth Sciences and Geography, as well as faculty from the University of Vermont and Columbia University."

A recent Valley News article reported on this study and some potential applications of the research.

To access the complete Valley News report, please visit:

Valley News: Dartmouth Study Finds Heavier Rainfall May Be Region's 'New Normal' (21 JUN 17)