Scientists have long cautioned that warming temperatures would lead to wetter and drier global extremes — increasingly severe rainfall, more intense droughts. A new study shows where that may already be happening.
The study provides an emerging picture of distortions in the total amount of water both above ground and also in aquifers deep beneath Earth’s surface, where most of the freshwater that humans depend upon comes from.
It relies on data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission, or GRACE, which uses satellites that can detect changes in gravity to measure fluctuations in water where other satellites can’t see. That way, it can provide information about locations where there are otherwise no gauges or wells.