Purpose of Review:

Review our current understanding of how precipitation is related to its thermodynamic environment, i.e., the water vapor and temperature in the surroundings, and implications for changes in extremes in a warmer climate.

Recent Findings:

Multiple research threads have i) sought empirical relationships that govern onset of strong convective precipitation, or that might identify how precipitation extremes scale with changes in temperature; ii) examined how such extremes change with water vapor in global and regional climate models under warming scenarios; iii) identified fundamental processes that set the characteristic shapes of precipitation distributions.

Summary:

While water vapor increases tend to be governed by the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship to temperature, precipitation extreme changes are more complex and can increase more rapidly, particularly in the tropics. Progress may be aided by bringing separate research threads together and by casting theory in terms of a full explanation of the precipitation probability distribution.

中文翻译：

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极端降水和水汽

审查目的：

回顾我们目前对降水与其热力学环境（即周围的水蒸气和温度）如何相关的理解，以及对温暖气候中极端变化的影响。

最近的发现：

多个研究线索 i) 寻找控制强对流降水发生的经验关系，或者可能确定极端降水如何随温度变化而变化的经验关系； ii) 研究全球和区域气候模型在变暖情景下这些极端情况如何随水蒸气变化； iii) 确定了决定降水分布特征形状的基本过程。

概括：

虽然水蒸气的增加往往受克劳修斯-克拉佩龙与温度的关系控制，但降水的极端变化更为复杂，并且增加得更快，特别是在热带地区。通过将不同的研究线索结合在一起以及根据降水概率分布的完整解释来构建理论，可能会有助于取得进展。