Atmospheric rivers
Australian Geographic Magazine|September - October 2022
Although they've been around for millennia, atmospheric rivers were only discovered by humans during the past 25 years.
By Dr Karl Kruszelnicki
Atmospheric rivers

In February 2022, one dumped cubic kilometres of water onto the city of Brisbane. An atmospheric river is a narrow, fast-flowing stream of moist air. It can be many thousands of kilometres long, and a few hundred wide. It's a giant and invisible conveyor belt of water in the sky, moving above and across the planet.

At any given moment, there are about a dozen of these atmospheric phenomena across the globe - most of them over water. But, unlike a land-based river, they are not fixed in location. Instead, they continually form, fade, reform and evolve. So they come and go.

This story is from the September - October 2022 edition of Australian Geographic Magazine.

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This story is from the September - October 2022 edition of Australian Geographic Magazine.

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