What is it about?
The global water cycle is undergoing unprecedented shifts from climate change, intensified by human water and land management practices. These changes are evident in phenomena such as depleted groundwater, earlier snowmelt, and erratic fluctuations in floods or drought occurrences. By integrating remote sensing data with models, our study developed a global water reanalysis dataset and highlighted 20 hotspot regions that are undergone such shifts in the past two decades in response to both climate and human activities.
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Photo by Vitaliy Gavrushchenko on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Water management practices, such as designing infrastructure for floods or using conventional drought indicators to assist drought management, assume that though hydrological conditions vary, those changes are always within a certain range or distribution that is time invariant. However, this assumption is flawed. The statistical properties of the water cycle are shifting, largely due to human impact, and the water cycle is intensifying. Our study may motivate future research and practical applications by offering a thorough examination of various types of shifts, and highlighting regions that are experiencing the most dramatic changes. This could result in enhanced early warning systems for extreme weather, more resilient infrastructure, and better water resource management.
Perspectives
One implication of this study is that the interaction among water, energy, and carbon fluxes are largely altered by human activities. Therefore, caution is warranted when integrating these variables into drought estimation, as they may offer conflicting insights. It is essential to synchronize these data with a deeper understanding of the underlying shifts and their causes to enhance the effectiveness of drought assessments.
Wanshu Nie
NASA
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nonstationarity in the global terrestrial water cycle and its interlinkages in the Anthropocene, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2403707121.
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