Where is all the water going from climate change?
Where is all the water going from climate change?
Now that late spring/early summer is upon us, there's increasingly more headlines about less rain in various places (recent floods notwithstanding). I'm assuming that's because water is evaporating and not returning to those places, but where is it going?
Is it arriving, now, in these bursty flash floods? Is it staying longer in the atmosphere and moving to new locations? Is more of it just staying in the atmosphere period?
Climate change is moving water around, not creating or destroying it. Warmer air holds more water, so overall, the atmosphere can hold (and at times drop) more water than before. Permanent ice is melting as well, so that puts a bit more fresh water into the air and ocean. The water in the atmosphere is constantly circling the globe, forced largely by the rotation of the earth. Warmer temperature also makes for more evapotranspiration, so more fresh surface water is pulled into the air. But that same water will eventually fall elsewhere.
The sun is the source of energy that drives wind, rain, and evaporation. When you trap more of that energy with GHGs, it just turns up the volume for all of those things. There’s always seasonal and geographic variability, but the extremes increase because all those phenomena are solar powered.
Cool, that's more of what I meant when I said "where is it going?" I didn't think it was disappearing; I more meant, "Where is it being stored or released?" Makes sense why there would be more of it when precipitation does show up, given that hotter air can store more.
I'm still curious, though, if certain local patterns are moving off to other locations. I'll have to look into that aspect, now that I kind of have an idea what to look for.
There’s been talk of some crops being able to be grown further north or south. But most of the weather patterns of a region are a function of proximity to ocean, predominant winds, and topography. It’s important not to confuse weather and climate. For a given drought or flood people may want to point to climate change as a cause, but it’s only going to amplify patterns that already existed.
Flash floods happen because dry soil doesn't absorb water very fast.
Here's a video with a visual. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urQHsOmoKLg
Very little water ever leaves the earth via the atmosphere, so most of the water goes to the oceans or to other places.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rare-june-atmospheric-river-takes-134720481.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/03/world/video/nairobi-kenya-flooding-rain-runda-madowo-pkg-digvid
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/rescue-worker-dies-southern-germany-floods-2024-06-02/
https://www.newsweek.com/pittsburgh-rainfall-record-flood-1906267
Record droughts in some places, record rains in others. Regular patterns breaking down means the extremes get more extreme, the swings get more rapid. That's not good news for anything.
It also means areas that have, over centuries, ecologically, culturally and technologically adapted to lots of rain are now hit by droughts, and vice versa.
I'm not an expert, but it's a very complex global system with moisture in the atmosphere sometimes falling as rain/snow, collecting in rivers and lakes, going into ground water/aquifers, flowing into the oceans, and sometimes just staying as moist air. If one area isn't getting it's usual rainfall, quite often another area is getting more, but it can also be that the moisture is just in other parts of that complex system. A lot is driven by high- and low-pressure systems, air temperature, water temperature, etc.
In my area of southern California, we've had some major, extended droughts. But the rising temperature of the Pacific has caused the air to hold more moisture, and we've also had some "atmospheric river" storms that drop insane amounts of rain. So even though we get an average of 13 inches of rain a year, we got more than 13 inches in just February, and we're up to almost 31 inches for the season. It wouldn't be surprising if we didn't get anymore until late in the year though.
Some of that rain went into snowpack, some into reservoirs, some into ground water, but we're close to the coast and all of it will go back to the ocean. Did we get rain that would normally have gone elsewhere, or was it rain that wouldn't normally have formed? I think it's likely hard to say, but maybe there are meteorologists or others who know more reading this.
Super interesting! Yeah, exactly where the water is going is just as interesting to me as why it's going.
Well, for the most part, it's just flowing into the ocean, like it always does. Evaporation over land is a very minor part of freshwater loss.