Rainy Weekday

Pollution in the Southeast might be making summertime storms stronger, according to new research. Storms that occur during the week in summer in the Southeast dump more rain on that part of the United States than storms that occur on weekends, likely because air pollution is “seeding” the clouds, researchers from NASA reported in a study published online in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research.

Lead author Thomas Bell, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, examined data from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite (TRMM) from 1998 to 2005 from the southeastern United States. He and his colleagues found that, on average, more rain fell between Tuesdays and Thursdays than between Saturdays and Mondays. Mid-week increases in rainfall were most significant in the afternoon, when conditions for summertime storms exist; afternoon rainfall peaked on Tuesdays, when 1.8 times more rainfall fell than on Saturdays, which saw the least amount of afternoon rain. Bell and his teammates used ground-based gauge data and vertical wind speed and cloud height measurements to confirm the weekly rainfall trend observed by TRMM.

For the full article subscribe to Weatherwise