Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are narrow regions responsible for the majority of the poleward water vapor transport across the midlatitudes. They are characterized by high water vapor content and strong low level winds, and form a part of the broader warm conveyor belt of extratropical cyclones. Although the meridional water vapor transport within ARs is critical for water resources, ARs can also cause disastrous floods especially when encountering mountainous terrain. They were labeled as atmospheric rivers in the 1990s, and have since become a well-studied feature of the midlatitude climate. We briefly review the conceptual model, the methods used to identify them, their main climatological characteristics, their impacts, the predictive ability of numerical weather prediction models, their relationship with large-scale ocean-atmosphere dynamics, possible changes under future climates, and some future challenges.

The effect of increased populations concentrated in urban areas, coupled with the ongoing threat of climate change, means that society is becoming increasingly vulnerable to the effects of extreme precipitation. The study of these events is therefore a key topic in climate research, in their physical basis, in the study of their impacts, and in our adaptation to them. From a meteorological perspective, the main questions are related to the definition of extreme events, changes in their distribution and intensity both globally and regionally, the dependence on large‐scale phenomena including the role of moisture transport, and changes in their behavior due to anthropogenic pressures. In this review article, we address all these points and propose a set of challenges for future research.This article is categorized under: Science of Water > Water Extremes Science of Water > Hydrological Processes

Hydrological processes play a key role in the Arctic, as well as being an important part of the response of this region to climate change. The origin of the moisture arriving (and then precipitating) in the Arctic is a crucial question in our understanding of the Arctic hydrological cycle. In an attempt to answer this, the present study uses the Lagrangian diagnosis model FLEXPART (FLEXible PARTicle dispersion model) to localize the main sources of moisture for the Arctic region, to analyze their variability and their contribution to precipitation, and to consider the implications of any changes in the transport of moisture from particular sources within the system. From this analysis, four major moisture sources appear as the most important moisture supplies into the system: the subtropical and southern extratropical Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, North America, and Siberia. Oceanic sources play an important role throughout the year, whereas continental ones only take effect in summer. The sink areas associated with each source have been shown to be moderately influenced by changes in atmospheric circulation, mainly associated with the East Atlantic pattern for the Atlantic source and related to West Pacific and Pacific/North American (PNA) teleconnection patterns for the Pacific one. On the other hand, the variability over the sinks does not seem to be significantly related to changes in evaporation at an interannual scale.