Scientists warn that Earth's water cycles are changing due to climate change faster than expected, causing countries to become drier and more humid.
This leads to more extreme weather events, including floods and longer droughts, says a team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
The global water cycle is the continuous movement of fresh water between clouds, land and ocean and plays an important role in our daily lives.
It's a fine mesh, maintaining habitable environments and soil fertility, and transporting water from the ocean to land, but the Australian team found that rising global temperatures make the system more extreme.
They found that water is moving away from dry areas toward wet areas, causing droughts to worsen in some areas, with intensified rainfall and flooding in others.
“In other words, wet areas are getting wetter, and dry areas are getting drier,” the team wrote. The subtle changes in the cycle, caused by global warming, have proven difficult to monitor directly as about 80 percent of global precipitation occurs over the oceans.
In this study, the team used changing patterns of ocean salt to estimate the amount of fresh ocean water that has moved from the equator to the poles since 1970.
They found that two to four times more fresh water moved through the water cycle system than climate models had predicted.