Washington DC, March 14 -- Climate change may lead to more precipitation and more intense floods. A new study shows that to understand the details of this relationship, it is important to distinguish between different types of rainfall and flood events -- namely, between short-term events that occur on a time scale of hours, and longer-term events that last several days. In each case, climate change has a different impact.

An Austrian research team has now shown for the first time that short-term precipitation and flood events on the scale of a few hours are particularly affected by the temperature increase caused by climate change.

For events on a longer time scale, the relationship is more complicated. This finding was made using deta...