The times — are they a-changin’? A global survey in annual precipitation changes

If one had to condense the research performed during the last decades on climate change, and based on the majority of published studies, into a single main conclusion then this would be that our climate changes. This change implies changes in all hydrometeorological variables. In fact, according to IPCC the increase in the global temperature will result in precipitation changes. Yet apart from future projections the majority of scientists agree that the precipitation has already changed in the past decades. In this study we perform one of the largest empirical analyses in annual precipitation by analyzing many thousands of records from all around the globe and focusing on the trends and mean differences at several interannual time scales. Our aim is simple: we try to conclude if annual precipitation has changed over the last decades or in Bob Dylan's words if "The times they are a-changin”.