A Drier Future?
Abstract
Global temperature increases affect the water cycle over land, but the nature of these changes remains difficult to predict. A key conceptual problem is to distinguish between droughts, which are transient regional extreme phenomena typically defined as departures from a local climatological norm that is presumed known, and the normal or background dryness itself. This background dryness depends on precipitation, but also on how fast water would evaporate. As the planet warms, global average rainfall increases, but so does evaporation. What is the likely net impact on average aridity?
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Science
Volume 343 | Issue 6172
14 February 2014
14 February 2014
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Copyright © 2014, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Published in print: 14 February 2014
Acknowledgments
This Perspective germinated at the Bert Bolin Centre 2013 Summer School on Subtropical Climate. We acknowledge the support of the National Basic Research Program of China (2012CB955303), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 41275070), and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
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