An atmospheric lake moves west toward the coastline of East Africa, where it could deliver much-need rain to the arid region. Credit: Brian Mapes/ NOAA ERA-Interim reanalysis data set.
Atmospheric lakes start as filaments of water vapor in the Indo-Pacific that become their own measurable, isolated objects. Credit: Brian Mapes/ NOAA ERA-Interim reanalysis data set.
These are questions that would need to be answered before Mapes and other researchers can begin to study how climate change could affect atmospheric lake systems. He plans to study these events more closely using satellite data and will look at into the possibility that these atmospheric lakes occur elsewhere in the world.
"The winds that carry these things to ashore are so tantalizingly, delicately near zero [wind speed], that everything could affect them," Mapes said. "That's when you need to know, do they self-propel, or are they driven by some very much larger-scale wind patterns that may change with climate change."
