A year in the life of the world's precipitation: video
/John Chiang gave the geolunch last week, and discussed the possible changes to tropical rainfall in the future. Tropical precipitation is controlled much differently than precipitation at the mid-latitudes. To illustrate this, at the begining of his talk he showed us this video from UCAR/NCAR visualization team, which is a simluation for one year from the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), a coupled climate model for simulating Earth's climate system using the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM), the latest in a series of global atmosphere models developed at NCAR for the weather and climate research communities. Watch storms develop in the mid-latitudes as clear easterly moving systems; in the tropics you have daily convective action governing precipitation.