The Mediterranean region has been declared a climate change hotspot due, among other reasons, to an expected increase in the torrential rains that frequently affect this densely populated area. However, the extent to which these torrential rains are connected to other regions outside the Mediterranean remains uncertain. Here we simulate 160 extreme precipitation events with an atmospheric model enabled for state-of-the-art moisture tracking and demonstrate that large scale moisture transport is a more important factor than evaporation over local sources. We find that the average precipitation fraction with source in the Mediterranean is only 35%, while 10% is from evapotranspiration over nearby land in continental Europe and 25% originates in the North Atlantic. The remaining 30% comes from several more distant source regions, sometimes as remote as the tropical Pacific or the Southern Hemisphere, indicating direct connections with multiple locations on the planet and a global scale energy redistribution. Our results point to the importance of approaching these extreme episodes from a more global rather than purely regional perspective, especially when attempting to attribute them to climate change.

地中海地区已被宣布为气候变化热点，除其他原因外，预计暴雨会增加，经常影响这个人口稠密的地区。然而，这些暴雨与地中海以外其他地区的联系程度仍不确定。在这里，我们使用能够进行最先进的水分跟踪的大气模型模拟 160 次极端降水事件，并证明大规模水分传输是比当地来源的蒸发更重要的因素。我们发现，平均降水比例只有 35% 来自地中海，而 10% 来自欧洲大陆附近陆地的蒸发蒸腾，25% 来自北大西洋。剩下的 30% 来自几个更远的来源地区，有时与热带太平洋或南半球一样遥远，这表明与地球上的多个地点有直接联系以及全球范围内的能源重新分配。我们的研究结果表明，从更全球而非纯粹的区域角度来处理这些极端事件的重要性，尤其是在试图将其归因于气候变化时。