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Search every verified Jennifer Catto interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Jennifer Catto, a researcher in atmospheric science, gave a talk in 2015 describing her work on weather fronts and their contribution to rainfall. She stated that in the mid-latitudes, 68% of rainfall comes from fronts, a figure she said had not been previously quantified globally. Catto also noted that rainfall from fronts is twice as heavy as non-frontal rainfall, and that her research involved using automated software to identify fronts in gridded observational data. Catto discussed the challenges of scientific publishing, including responding to reviewer criticism about methodology. She said that her work has been used to evaluate climate models, with the goal of understanding how rainfall patterns related to fronts may change in the future. She also mentioned a scientific consensus in Australia that declining rainfall in Perth was due to fewer fronts, but noted that a colleague had found no decline in the number of fronts over the past 30 years.
“In the mid latitudes of the globe, 68% of rainfall comes from fronts. This sounds like a fairly simple number for so much work, but really nobody had found this number before; nobody had looked globally at how much rain comes from fronts.”
“We know that the climate is changing due to increased emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities, but as well as increasing the global average temperature, climate change is changing rainfall patterns over the globe.”
“There is a general scientific consensus in Australia that the declining rainfall in Perth was due to a decline in the number of fronts passing over that region, but a colleague of mine had recently shown that actually the number of fronts in that region hadn't declined over the past 30 years.”
“The rainfall coming from fronts is actually twice as heavy as rainfall coming when there's not a front. This wasn't really a surprise because we know that fronts bring a lot of rainfall, but again nobody had quantified this number.”
STEM Talks 2015 On the front line: finding how much rain comes from fronts Dr Jennifer Catto.
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