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6 innovative ways to store energy

As the world looks to a renewable-energy future, storage becomes a concern because with renewables, supply and demand aren’t always in balance.

Renewable energy sources such as wind and the sun aren’t always “on” when consumers need energy, and excess power that can’t be used immediately is wasted unless it’s stored.

Storing energy can be expensive, however, so some utilities use plants that burn fossil fuels to make up the difference during times of peak demand. Those plants operate most efficiently when at full power, however, and using these plants to redistribute power can lead to more pollution.

Chemical batteries are useful for electric vehicles but they may not be the best option for utility companies. Chemical batteries’ life cycles can also be short. Lithium ion batteries, for example, last about five to 10 years. They’re expensive. And the metals used to make them raise issues of geopolitics and human rights.

Looking at other materials seems to be a good idea.

Here are six innovative materials and methods we might use instead:

PUMP STORAGE WITH WATER

This isn’t a new idea: People have been using pump storage since the early 20th century. Early pump storage used fossil fuels to move water from a lower reservoir to a higher one during off-peak hours, when that energy was cheapest. Then when the energy was needed, gravity returned the water to the lower reservoir, turning turbines as it flowed. Such systems today can substitute renewable energy for power from fossil fuels. This is the most popular method of storing electricity today and accounts for 93 percent of utility-scale energy storage in the United States.

GRAVITY BATTERIES

As with the pump-storage system, this uses renewable energy to raise an object from a lower level to a higher one. But instead of water, it’s a heavy mass that generates gravitational potential energy. When the energy is needed, the mass is slowly dropped. The motor that raised it in the first place switches to generator mode and energy is sent off to the consumer. How much energy is produced and how long it is generated depends on the height and weight of the lift. One company working with the technology, Gravitricity in Scotland, is investigating the use of deep decommissioned mines for gravity energy storage. The company estimates that some 14,000 mines around the world could be repurposed for energy storage.

FLYWHEELS

A flywheel can be as simple as the power system in a child’s friction toy or as complex as NASA’s G2 system for energy storage in a spacecraft. The flywheel is essentially a mechanical battery with a heavy weight that rotates around an axis. Energy gets the wheel spinning. And if it spins fast enough, it can store energy. The limiting factors are friction and how much force the wheel can take before it breaks.

SAND BATTERIES

The sand battery uses sand or a sandlike substance heated to temperatures well above the boiling point of water – about 500 degrees C. Cool air blown through pipes in the storage facility picks up the heat and can be used, for example, to convert water into process steam. The first commercial sand battery in Finland uses about 100 tons of low-grade sand to warm homes, offices and a municipal swimming pool year-round, and its developers say the sand can hold its heat for months.

THERMODYNAMIC STORAGE USING COMPRESSED AIR

This system uses electrical energy to create high-pressure compressed air, which can be released later to drive a turbine generator. Utility-scale versions of these systems are generally located in caverns. A variant of this storage system is underwater compressed air energy storage, which benefits from the constant water pressure and could be useful for coastal locations.

WOOD BATTERIES

About 30 percent of a tree – depending on species – is lignin, the glue that holds its cellulose fibers together. The polymer lignin also contains carbon, which as it turns out is a great material for a battery part called an anode.

Finland’s Stora Enso happens to have lots of trees: It calls itself the one of the largest owners of private forest in the world. And according to the BBC, the company’s engineers say they can extract the lignin they need from waste pulp the company is already producing.

Stora Enso has entered into a partnership with Swedish company Northvolt to create batteries sourced sustainably in Nordic countries. They expect to be in production as early as 2025.

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2 promising approaches to
treating wastewater

Wastewater treatment protects human as well as environmental health. And it conserves water. Abu Dhabi researchers offer promising approaches using innovative membranes:

Filtering out nutrients

High levels of nutrients sounds like a benefit to an ecosystem, but when an environment sees too many, otherwise known as eutrophication, algal blooms and waters with too little oxygen can kill fish and seagrass, setting off a chain reaction in the ecosystem.

Large amounts of carbon dioxide from the decomposing matter acidify the water, slowing the growth of fish and shellfish. Eutrophication is an economic threat as well — smaller harvests mean more expensive seafood.

“We need to control the levels of nutrients and develop innovative technologies to treat water and remove excess nutrients,” says Shadi Hasan, director of the Khalifa University Center for Membranes and Advanced Water Technology (CMAT), whose team published its research in npj Clean Water.

The KU team developed a composite polylactic acid (PLA) and nanomaterial membrane to remove nutrients from wastewater.

The membrane works via adsorption, the process by which a solid holds molecules, in this case liquid, as a thin film. The team used a functionalized positively charged multi-walled carbon nanotube/graphene oxide hybrid nanomaterial to remove nitrogen (as ammonia) and phosphorus from wastewater while enhancing water permeability. The nutrients are collected in the pores of the nanotubes at the surface of the membrane.

Removing oil from water

Wastewater can be difficult to treat, especially when trying to remove fine oil droplets.

“The large volume of industrial oily wastewater is difficult to treat due to its emulsified fine oil droplet content,” says Linda Zou, a Khalifa University professor. “Conventional membranes experience low separation efficiency and oil fouling issues, which we wanted to overcome.”

Zou and other researchers incorporated molybdenum disulfide (MOS2) nanospheres into a cellulose acetate matrix. MOS2 nanospheres repel water but attract oil — that is, they are oleophilic — whereas the cellulose acetate polymer has high water affinity and is hydrophilic. The membrane is designed to be amphiphilic, meaning it can target and capture oil droplets in a large volume of water. This is important for separation because the membrane has components that attract the oil droplets but can also facilitate the passage of water.

The membrane’s amphiphilic nature also eliminates fouling caused by oil droplets.

The team found the membrane had a high separation efficiency in tests, with greater than 90 percent removal of oil from the diluted oil-in-water mixture. The membrane also had good stability and durability, meaning it could be used repeatedly without losing performance, which makes it a promising material for industrial application.

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Polluted oceans:
Let the trash take itself out

Up to 12.7 million tons of waste makes its way into the world’s oceans each year, forming massive “plastic islands” in oceanic gyres and devastating birds and marine life in the process.

Cleanup, in which plastics are currently collected at sea, stored and shipped to shore for disposal, is estimated to take from 50 to 130 years with annual costs expected by some at nearly US $37 million. In the meantime, the trash is degrading faster than it can be gathered, disintegrating into harmful and even more difficult to mitigate microscopic forms.

Listen to the Deep Dive

Now a team of researchers from Massachusetts in the United States is suggesting a new approach: self-powered cleanup vessels that turn the trash they harvest from the seas into the fuel they use for the job.

RELATED: Microplastics: The invisible threat

The “blue diesel”-powered ships could reduce the amount of fuel and roundtrips needed to remove ocean waste, the researchers write in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The researchers, representing Harvard University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, suggest using high temperatures and high pressure in a process called hydrothermal liquefaction to depolymerize the plastics into a harnessable energy, creating self-powered cleanup that eliminates the need to refuel or unload plastic waste and potentially reduces total cleanup times.

Of course, it isn’t enough to clean up the oceans faster and with less fuel waste. The world needs to address the amount of garbage that makes it into the oceans in the first place, the researchers write. “Reducing or eliminating the amount of plastic waste generated is critically important, especially when the current loading may persist for years to even decades,” they say.

 COVID’s toll on the oceans 

Meanwhile, researchers from China’s School of Atmospheric Sciences at Nanjing University and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego say the COVID-19 pandemic is making an already bad situation in the oceans even worse.

Also writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the scientists say that of the 8 million tons of plastic waste generated until recently in the fight against the virus, about 25,000 tons of medical waste, mostly from hospitals, has entered the world’s oceans. And more is expected to come, not only damaging marine species but potentially spreading contaminants including the COVID-19 virus.

The hospital trash, they say, dwarfs the amount of waste from discarded personal-protective equipment (PPEs) and plastic packaging produced by a surge of online shopping in the wake of the pandemic. For a little perspective, the authors cite another study estimating that 1.56 million face masks made it to the oceans in 2020.

Plastics that wash into the oceans are endangering wildlife. IMAGE: Shutterstock

Five of the top six rivers associated with medical-waste discharge are in Asia (Shatt al Arab, Indus, Yangtze,Ganges Brahmaputra and Amur). The other, the Danube, is in Europe.

The authors call for increased public awareness of plastics’ environmental impacts; better collection, treatment and recycling of plastic waste; and improved waste-management practices at pandemic epicenters, particularly in developing countries.

 Microbots to the rescue? 

A solution to microplastics in water might come in an equally small package: microbots.

The bacterium-size bots when added to water with a little hydrogen peroxide attach to microscopic bits of plastic and begin to break them down. The research was recently published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“They can sweep a much larger area than you would be able to touch with stationary technology,” says study co-author Martin Pumera, a researcher at the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague.

Pumera envisions setting the microbots loose in the oceans to collect microplastics, but Win Cowger, an expert in plastic pollution at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved with the study, tells Scientific American that closed systems such as those for drinking-water or wastewater treatment would probably be better potential targets.

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Lessons from the desert beetle

Could a desert beetle be the key to pulling water from the air?

Residents of the world’s most arid regions might someday raise a glass of water to the Namib desert beetle, which is giving up secrets to harvesting water from the air.

Several species of Namib desert beetles are native to an area of southwestern Africa without much ground water and rainfall averages of about 1.3 to 5 centimeters a year. To compensate, the beetles  “fog bask,” leaning into the fog that rolls in several times a week to collect the water they need to stay alive. Water from the air collects on the beetles’ abdomens, then rolls into their mouths.

Researchers have studied the beetles for decades, but several teams have peeled back more of their mysteries in recent years.

The desert beetle inspired researchers, who found that bumpy surfaces caught water droplets with more efficiency than did a smooth sphere. IMAGE: Anas Albounni, KUST Review

Hunter King, a physicist at the University of Akron in Ohio, USA, and his team took their cues from the bumps on the beetle’s back and found that shape and texture could become a “fog magnet,” with 1-millimeter bumps catching water with 2.5 times more efficiency than a smooth sphere with the same surface area.

“We think the real take-away message is one of enhanced filtration of hard-to-catch, low inertia particles/droplets,” King says.

In 2021, researchers from Fuzhou and Soochow universities in China and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore reported on how they mimicked the beetle’s exoskeleton, weaving superhydrophilic and superhydrophobic materials with copper particles to increase the water-harvesting rate of conventional fog harvesters. The researchers say their biomimetic material would be well-suited to large-scale production.

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A river runs over it

Think the Amazon River is the largest river on Earth? Technically, you’d be right but the river with twice the amount of water than the Amazon can be found in the sky.

Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow bands of concentrated water vapor that produce major amounts of rainfall. They exist on a global scale, transporting moisture from the tropics to the higher latitudes.

And they can have a huge effect on the way you live. “Atmospheric rivers are responsible for important impacts throughout the Earth’s middle and polar latitudes, such as flooding, influence on water resources, and melting of polar ice sheets,” explains Kyle Mattingly of the University of Wisconsin.

IMAGE: Unsplash
Like a hurricane
but not

Atmospheric rivers are not big hurricanes. Read more›››

Although they share many features (high winds and lots of rain originating from the tropics), atmospheric rivers are sustained, moving bands of moisture with wide-spread impact. Think a jet stream, but wet, and closer to the ground.

Hurricanes, on the other hand, are rapidly rotating storm systems that concentrate their water content into precipitation over a much smaller area. Hurricanes take heat from the tropics to the poles, which plays an important role in regulating global climate; atmospheric rivers take moisture out of the tropics and spread it around the world.‹‹‹ Read less

A 1998 paper from Yong Zhu and Reginald Newell, the researchers who coined the term, says on any given day, atmospheric rivers account for over 90 percent of the global north-south water-vapor transport.

There are typically three to five rivers present within a hemisphere at any given time, and any single one can carry a greater flux of water than the Amazon River. For context, that’s about 6,592 cubic kilometers of water every year, or more water than the next seven largest independent rivers combined. It’s just water vapor instead of liquid water.

These rivers in the sky help replenish reservoirs and redistribute water in the Earth system, but they can also be detrimental to the places they deposit water.

Extreme weather events such as severe flooding and high winds are now found to be associated with atmospheric rivers. These elongated tendrils of moisture stretching from the tropics poleward act as conveyor belts, feeding huge amounts of tropical moisture into existing weather systems, intensifying the rainfall. Record-breaking rainfall is often associated with an atmospheric river making landfall.

However, this water content doesn’t just fall out of the sky on a whim. The rivers pass through various atmospheric conditions on their journey, and where conditions are right for precipitation, water is released as rain or snow. Mountainous regions are particularly effective at squeezing moisture out of these sky rivers as wind travels up their sides.

A NEW ANCIENT PHENOMENON

Despite earning a name only in 1998, atmospheric rivers have been meandering through the skies for millions of years — they’re not new. So why are atmospheric rivers making a splash in the current zeitgeist?

Climate change, of course.

Plus, it’s a useful and versatile term, says Mattingly. “The ‘rivers in the sky’ metaphor helps to vividly communicate these scientific ideas to the public. In places such as California, where they have major impact, the concept helps people connect weather they experience personally with processes operating at much larger scales in the climate system.”

Understanding atmospheric rivers is key to improving weather forecasts for better managing water resources and predicting flood risk. However, atmospheric rivers are also influenced by climate change.

Previous work has examined the relationship between weather patterns and atmospheric-river development, but with climate change, these features may become more variable — and therefore harder to predict. This could mean a less reliable source of precipitation for those areas depending on the water redistribution, but could also mean extreme flooding in other places.

To those living in the Middle East, huge amounts of rainfall are pretty rare and would likely be welcomed to recharge oases, water crops and wash away the dust that accumulates in cities. The reality can be much more detrimental than beneficial, unfortunately.

A global phenomenon, atmospheric rivers have far-reaching influences on weather patterns and natural disasters. IMAGES: Unsplash and Pexels

Although a large body of research has shown the impacts of atmospheric rivers on weather-related natural disasters over the western United States and Europe, little is known about their mechanisms and contribution to flooding in the Middle East.

However, a rare atmospheric river was found responsible for the record floods of March 2019 in Iran that damaged one-third of the country’s infrastructure and saw the death of 76 people. This river started its 9,000-kilometer journey in the Atlantic Ocean before making landfall over the Zagros Mountains. It needed special conditions to make this trek across North Africa, including anomalously warm sea-surface temperatures.

What do we know is a symptom of global warming? Rising sea temperatures. The moisture transported by this rare atmospheric river was equivalent to more than 150 times the accumulated flow of the four major rivers in the region: the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun and Karkheh. Even now, people are still wrestling with the aftermath.

It was a rare atmospheric river for 2019. But like hurricanes, atmospheric rivers are projected to grow longer, wider and wetter in a warming climate. Several recent studies have modelled how atmospheric rivers will change in the coming decades: The planet warms, more water evaporates and a wetter atmosphere makes for stronger storms.

BLOWING HOT AND COLD

Challenging our understanding of atmospheric-river genesis is the increasing activity in the polar regions. Atmospheric rivers developing near the poles transport large amounts of moisture and heat and have been playing a significant role in short-duration but high-volume melt events over the Arctic and Antarctic in recent years.

There are several reasons for this, explains Mattingly. “Research to date has shown that atmospheric rivers can increase ice melt by enhancing the water-vapor greenhouse effect, releasing condensational latent heat into the air over the ice, forming bands of cloud that reflect heat back to the surface, and providing more water to the cyclones ahead of which they develop. In addition, atmospheric rivers are closely related to the atmospheric fronts over the Southern Ocean, which, in turn, reinforce subantarctic cyclone dynamics.”

The number and intensity of cyclones around Antarctica over the past few decades have increased as the storm tracks shift toward the pole under enhanced greenhouse-gas concentrations.

In the largest calving event from the Amery Ice Shelf since 1963, an iceberg 1,636 square kilometers with an estimated weight of 315 billion tons broke away from its glacier in September 2019.

Melting polar ice is concerning enough, but global warming and atmospheric changes could lead to more such calving events.

Atmospheric rivers can increase ice melt by enhancing the water-vapor greenhouse effect.

– Kyle Mattingly, University of Wisconsin

Cyclogenesis, the formation of cyclones, is a major factor in this, and an increase in the frequency and intensity of atmospheric rivers in the region will only exacerbate the problem. It’s not just calving events we need to be worried about.

Despite their distance, the sand dunes of the Sahara and the ice caps of the Antarctic are linked by global atmospheric phenomena. CREDIT: Anas Albounni, KUST Review

“Our analysis of the polynya event in September 2017, where a body of unfrozen ocean appeared within a thick body of ice during Antarctica’s winter, shows that the atmospheric rivers that initiated this were the most intense on record,” Mattingly says. “Surprisingly, these atmospheric rivers resulted in the highest amount of snowfall on record over the study area, but because of the warm temperatures, it was this warm snow that enhanced the ice melt and inhibited refreezing.”

It may be rare now, but under a warmer climate, atmospheric-river activity is expected to intensify considerably: a scary thought when we now know it can melt the sea ice in the middle of the Antarctic winter.

It’s not all bad, though. Within the sea-ice zones of both hemispheres these polynyas act as oases, enabling marine mammals such as walruses, narwhals and belugas to overwinter.

Some polynyas, such as the North Water Polynya between Canada and Greenland, occur at the same time and place each year. Animals can adapt their life strategies to this regularity, with polynyas in McMurdo Sound in the Antarctic providing a vital winter feeding place for the Cape Royds penguin colony.

IMAGE: Unsplash
A bad year for oysters

Aside from crazy weather, atmospheric rivers can have unexpected secondary consequences. Read more›››

In 2011, there was a massive wild Olympia oyster die-off in Northern California. These oysters were sensitive to the low salinity levels caused by excess freshwater dropped into the ocean from the sky by the 20 atmospheric rivers that passed through the region between October 2010 and September 2011.

It is yet to be seen what other marine life may be affected by an increased frequency in atmospheric rivers. ‹‹‹ Read less

The problem arises in the intensification of the atmospheric rivers affecting a larger area than that of the natural polynya, which may prevent sea-ice growth around the polynya and contribute to keeping it open even after the river moves on.

Jonathon Wille, postdoctoral researcher at the Université Grenoble Alpes, is also investigating the impacts of atmospheric rivers on Antarctica.

“The Antarctic continent, like many deserts in the world, receives a large percentage of its yearly precipitation from just a few intense events,” Wille explains. “They may be rarer here, but they still have a major influence on the surface-mass balance of the ice sheet and are responsible for 10 to 20 percent of the total snowfall across East Antarctica.

“This may seem a modest percentage, but this contribution to the snowfall budget has been driving parts of the positive annual snowfall trends in some areas and the negative trends in others. Atmospheric rivers also control the year-to-year variability of precipitation across most of the ice sheet.”

Given this link, increased future atmospheric river activity would result in higher snowfall accumulation on the Antarctic continent. Combine this with Mattingly’s results showing it was snow that melted the sea ice, and we have a problem.

CLOSER TO HOME

If Antarctica feels too far flung to worry about, you can always turn your attention to the European Alps.

Over the past four decades, there has been a pronounced reduction in the snow depth in the Alps, says Diana Francis, senior research scientist at Khalifa University, and, for once, it’s not a warming planet that is directly to blame. A new atmospheric river route has appeared, originating in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and drifting over the Sahara Desert on its way to Europe, bringing desert dust with it.

“Dust may actually play a bigger role in melting snow than ambient air temperature,” Francis explains. “It’s estimated that a single dust event in March 2018, where Saharan sand blew in over the Caucasus Mountains, may have shortened the snow-cover duration by up to 30 days, with this effect even more pronounced at higher elevations.”

Cryoconite is dust made up of microscopic mineral and organic particles that are carried by the winds and fall on the ice. IMAGE: Shutterstock

The dust magnifies the snowmelt in a number of ways.

Dust may actually play a bigger role in melting snow than ambient air temperature.

– Diana Francis, senior research scientist at Khalifa University

For starters, airborne dust enhances the radiative effects of the water vapor in the atmospheric river, meaning the air can hold higher amounts of moisture, and the dust particles can act as cloud-condensation nuclei, promoting the development of clouds that then rain on the mountain snow.

Then, there’s the dust that is deposited on the snow. Dust on the snow impedes the albedo effect, where the white snow reflects the UV radiation back, reducing the heat and keeping things cool.

Dust-covered snow can’t do this, with the darker surface absorbing a larger fraction of the incoming solar radiation, causing it to melt. Drastically, in fact, as Francis confirms the snow-albedo feedback in response to Saharan dust can lead to the snow melting up to 38 days earlier than normal.

That’s not all.

Mineral dust on snow and ice can provide nutrients to the microalgae that grow there. That might not sound so bad, but when microbes grow in abundance they can cause holes in the ice and snow cover, called cryoconite holes.

Among the 21 countries in the MENA region, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have benefited the most from this phenomenon.

– Mehry Akbary, assistant professor at the University of Tehran

The microalgae tend to concentrate at the bottom of these holes, creating a dark mass, which further reduces the albedo effect. As the snow melts, more of the darker material is exposed on the surface, creating a vicious circle.

The jet streams that zoom over the Earth often bring dust to northern latitudes, but with new atmospheric rivers lending a hand, alpine skiers won’t get much opportunity to enjoy the slopes.

But again, it’s not all bad. In a world without atmospheric rivers, drought would reign supreme. Atmospheric rivers are crucial to rebalancing water distribution around the planet, and while an increase in rain may be devastating, no rain at all would be just as bad. A better understanding of the future of rivers in the sky may also help water-resource managers on the ground.

THE GOOD NEWS

Mehry Akbary, assistant professor at the University of Tehran, thinks her findings on the development of atmospheric rivers in the Middle East and North Africa could be used to compensate for the shortage of water resources in this desert region.

The MENA region lies at the interface of the subtropics and mid-latitudes, and its geographical location means there is significant uncertainty about the magnitude of future changes to precipitation in much of the region.

However, because atmospheric water vapor will increase with increasing temperatures, researchers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, University of Balamand Dubai, University of California and California State University say in their 2020 paper, confidence is high that precipitation extremes will increase in frequency and intensity throughout the MENA region.

Akbary thinks this could be more beneficial than detrimental, though. “As the most arid deserts of the world are located in the MENA region, atmospheric rivers can be counted as good sources of precipitation. Among the 21 countries in the MENA region, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have benefited the most from this phenomenon.”

Atmospheric rivers account for more than 30 percent of the total rainfall across the MENA region, with some areas seeing almost half their precipitation from rivers in the sky. “I believe if water storage systems are suitable, this huge amount of rainfall could be stored for coming droughts,” Akbary says.

Desertification may be kept at bay by the live-giving moisture in atmospheric rivers. CREDIT: Anas Albounni, KUST Review

In models simulating the year 2100, calibrated to represent a high-emissions future, we can see increases in atmospheric-river frequency in the North African coast, Turkey and Iran. This doesn’t mean the rest of the region will dry up: on the contrary, there is an expected increase in precipitation for the Arabian Peninsula.

From the Horn of Africa to the United Arab Emirates, more rain is coming. More water for a parched land can only be welcomed, but locals need to prepare for the accompanying high winds and flooding potential.

Mattingly thinks the largest impact from more frequent atmospheric rivers will be their effects on flooding and water resources. “More intense atmospheric rivers will lead directly to more intense floods in the future, and we are already seeing examples of extreme floods in recent years that were likely exacerbated by the fact a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor.

Although more rainfall might help replenish water resources in some areas, wetter and warmer atmospheric rivers will also present challenges to water managers in the future. For example, in areas such as the western U.S. that are heavily dependent on snow pack for their water resources, atmospheric rivers are expected to bring more rain to the region, rather than snow, which will likely result in depleted snow packs and stressed water resources during the dry summer months.”

In general, water managers are working to be more flexible in their approach to managing resources in the future.

– Kyle Mattingly, University of Wisconsin

It’s not all doom and gloom, though, Mattingly is keen to point out. “I do think that in general, water managers are working to be more flexible in their approach to managing resources in the future. California is, again, a good example, because in the past few years they have had to deal with a few wet seasons against the backdrop of a long-term drought and overall warming that has depleted reservoirs and snow packs. The challenge seems to be to develop approaches that conserve the water delivered quickly during more intense rain events to help ride out drought years.”

Models from around the world agree: Atmospheric rivers will become more frequent and intense as the planet warms. The researchers behind these models also agree: Knowing how atmospheric rivers develop and move – and what they may pick up along the way – is an important step toward accurately predicting them and their associated rainfall.