Precipitation - and rain in particular - are important natural phenomena for human life on our planet. We have known for a long time that all water that evaporates from the Earth's surface will eventually return to the surface as precipitation. But which processes or characteristics of the Earth system determine how precipitation gets partitioned between land and ocean? Do fundamental physical laws such as water and energy balance equations constrain this partitioning? How do surface characteristics influence the way it rains?

In my PhD project, I try to answer these and other related questions with the help of simple box models.

Supervisors: Cathy Hohenegger und Bjorn Stevens

Schmidt, L. and Hohenegger, C.: OCELAND: A Conceptual Model to Explain the Partitioning of Precipitation between Land and Ocean, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-2709, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-2709, 2022.