atmospheric river
at-mus-FAIR-ik RIV-er
A long, narrow corridor of concentrated moisture in the atmosphere, hundreds of miles wide and thousands of miles long, carrying water vapor from the tropics to higher latitudes. When an atmospheric river makes landfall, it can deliver catastrophic rainfall — or the snowfall that fills a season's reservoirs.
Etymology
English compound. The meteorological term was coined in the 1990s by researchers Yong Zhu and Reginald Newell at MIT.
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