英语听力：探索发现 科学新发现：我们的大气层-14

A single river can carry three times as much water as the entire Mississippi, they provide almost half the annual rain fall for parts of the American Pacific coast, but when they remain in one area for a day or more, they can produce violent flooding.

Heavy winds, lots of water vapor¹, a strong * not moving fast, adds up to a big flooding.

The rivers were only recently discovered because they form over the world's oceans, we still don't have enough data to forecast their floods. 

An example of the challenges we face in weather prediction is that while this model can actually produce an atmospheric² river like we see right here, a week ago today we looked at the forecast for today, and it said there should be a strong atmospheric river creating heavy rain in northern California, while instead it is in Canada, it's a huge difference.

To fill the gap³ in data, Ralph explores the rivers on research lights, the rivers form in front of banks of cold air, they creat channels of wind that carry huge quantities of water vapor from the ocean to the coast at up to 100 miles an hour.

These are like conveyor belts for water vapor, they are very narrow, and yet they do 90% of the water vapor transport for the global atmosphere at those altitudes.

When the air flow hits a mountain, it rises up, shedding⁴ its water as rain and snow, Ralph has tracked how the rives move with the changing seasons.

1 vapor   

n.蒸汽，雾气

参考例句：

• The cold wind condenses vapor into rain.冷风使水蒸气凝结成雨。
• This new machine sometimes transpires a lot of hot vapor.这部机器有时排出大量的热气。

2 atmospheric   

adj.大气的，空气的；大气层的；大气所引起的

参考例句：

• Sea surface temperatures and atmospheric circulation are strongly coupled.海洋表面温度与大气环流是密切相关的。
• Clouds return radiant energy to the surface primarily via the atmospheric window.云主要通过大气窗区向地表辐射能量。

3 gap   

n.缺口；间隔；差距；不足，缺陷

参考例句：

• We must see that there is no gap in our defence.我们必须确保我们的防御没有漏洞。
• There is a gap of five miles between towns.镇与镇之间相隔五英里。

4 shedding   

n.脱落，蜕落v.流出( shed的现在分词 )；流下；蜕皮；树叶脱落

参考例句：

• The factory is shedding a large number of jobs. 这家工厂正大批裁员。
• The trees began shedding their leaves. 树木开始落叶。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》