Climate change is expected to cause wet regions to get wetter and dry regions to get drier, but new research suggests that the truth is more complicated.
water cycle
Posted inScience Updates
Salinity Monitoring Gives Insight into the Global Water Cycle
Salinity and Water Cycle over the Oceans: Recent Progress and Future Challenges; Hamburg, Germany, 12–15 October 2015
Posted inScience Updates
Forecasting India's Water Future
The NORINDIA project sheds light on how climate change could affect monsoons, droughts, and glaciers in northern India.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Estimating Evaporation
A new framework provides scientists with a more precise understanding of potential evaporation from drying land surfaces.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
The Forgotten Water Vapor at High Altitudes
Scientists find that estimations of high-altitude atmospheric water, critical for the greenhouse effect, are not as accurate as previously thought.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Building New Ways to Think About Arctic Freshwater
A new literature review summarizes the complex role of freshwater in the Arctic and its impact on climate and biogeochemical systems as a whole.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Could Thinning of High Clouds Combat Climate Change?
A climate engineering technique that lets more heat escape from the atmosphere could avoid water cycle suppression associated with other radiation management approaches.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
The Coming Blue Revolution
Managing water scarcity, one of the most pressing challenges society faces today, will require a novel conceptual framework to understand our place in the hydrologic cycle.
Posted inScience Updates
Setting the Stage for a Global Science of Atmospheric Rivers
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography International Atmospheric Rivers Workshop; La Jolla, California, 15–17 June 2015
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Surface Climate Processes Keep Earth's Energy Balance in Check
Models show that an abrupt increase in carbon dioxide emissions would trigger feedback processes that would change Earth's hydrological cycle.