最大的河流在我们上空
Atmospheric rivers can carry the same amount of water vapor as 15 to 20 Mississippi Rivers-and deliver punishing winds, too. Christopher Intagliata reports.
大气长河可以承载15到20个密西西比河流量的水汽，同时还能传播狂风。克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔报道。
撰文/播音：克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）
翻译：郭鑫鹏
审校：杨枭
Back in January, one of California’s oldest and most iconic residents keeled over: the Pioneer Cabin tree, a giant sequoia in Calaveras Big Trees State Park…so big you used to be able to drive through it.
回到一月，加利福尼亚州最年长和最有标志性的居民之一倒下了：它是卡拉维拉斯大树州立公园中一棵巨大的红杉，被称为先锋舱树。它非常巨大，曾经你需要驾车才能绕过它。
The giant was blown over by high winds-delivered by what’s called an atmospheric river, a long stream of water vapor in the atmosphere, 100 miles wide. These systems might be thought of as some of the biggest rivers on Earth.
这个巨物是被所谓的“大气长河”送来的强风吹倒的。这是一种存在于大气中的的水汽长流，能达到100英里宽。这个系统可以被认为是地球上最大的河流。
“You could kind of pose it that way, yeah.” Duane Walliser(WALL-i-ser), an atmospheric scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab. “An atmospheric river will carry the same amount of water vapor as, say, 15 to 20 Mississippi Rivers.”
“你可以这样去感受它，”喷气推进实验室的一名大气科学家杜安·瓦利赛尔（Duane Walliser）说。“一个大气长河可以承载等同于15到20个密西西比河的水汽量。”
Walliser and his JPL colleague Bin Guan developed an algorithm to detect atmospheric rivers in historical data, so they could connect the sky flow to extreme events on land. And they found that, if you look at just the top 2 percent most extreme wind- and rain- and snow-storms in the world’s midlatitude regions-atmospheric rivers are linked to up to half of them.
瓦利赛尔和他的实验室同事关斌（Bin Guan）开发了一个演算程序来检测历史数据中的大气长河，这样他们可以把大气流动和地面上发生的极端事件联系在一起。他们发现，如果你在中纬度地区观察前2%的极端天气，诸如风、雨、雪、风暴，那么你会发现它们中的一半都与大气长河有关。
And of the 19 windstorms in Europe that cost insurance companies the most money-billions of dollars in damage-atmospheric rivers were behind three-quarters of those events. The study is in the journal Nature Geoscience. [Duane Waliser and Bin Guan, Extreme winds and precipitation during landfall of atmospheric rivers]
在欧洲的19个让保险公司损失巨大的风暴中——造成高达数十亿美元的损失——其中有四分之三都是大气长河在背后发挥着作用。这项研究发表在期刊《自然地球科学》上。
Looking ahead, as global temperatures rise, that warmer air holds more water vapor. “And so the tendency looks like, if the climate does warm, you would tend to have stronger or more frequent atmospheric rivers.” And as this study shows: it won’t just be that a hard rain’s gonna fall. We’ll be blowing in the wind, too.
放眼未来，随着全球气温升高，更温暖的大气中蕴含着更多的水汽。“这是趋势，如果气候变暖，就会出现更强和更频繁的大气长河。”就如这项研究告诉我们的一样：这不仅意味着暴雨降临，还有狂风。
-Christopher Intagliata
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京ICP备11000850号-1
京公网安备11010502039775号 信息网络传播视听节目许可证0111611号
国家科技基础条件平台