{"id":29028,"date":"2025-06-04T15:40:22","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T15:40:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=29028"},"modified":"2025-06-04T16:24:15","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T16:24:15","slug":"its-not-just-poor-rains-causing-drought-the-atmosphere-is-thirstier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=29028","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Not Just Poor Rains Causing Drought. The Atmosphere Is \u2018Thirstier.\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Higher temperatures caused by climate change are driving complex processes that make droughts bigger and more severe, new research shows.<\/p>\n

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Look down from a plane at farms in the Great Plains and the West and you\u2019ll see green circles dotting the countryside, a kind of agricultural pointillism.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re from center-pivot sprinklers. But some farmers are finding older versions of these systems, many built 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, aren\u2019t keeping up with today\u2019s hotter reality, said Meetpal Kukal, an agricultural hydrologist at the University of Idaho. \u201cThere\u2019s a gap between how much water you can apply and what the crop demands are,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

By the time the sprinkler\u2019s arm swings back around to its starting point, the soil has nearly dried out. The main culprit? Atmospheric thirst.<\/p>\n

\u201cA hotter world is a thirstier one,\u201d said Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford. He led a new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature<\/a>, which found that atmospheric thirst, a factor that fills in some of the blanks in our understanding of drought, over the last four decades has made droughts more frequent, more intense and has caused them cover larger areas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In general, droughts happen when there\u2019s an imbalance between water supply and demand.<\/p>\n

Rain delivers water to the surface. The atmosphere removes water from the surface through evaporation, with temperature, wind, humidity and radiation from the sun controlling how much water is evaporated. It\u2019s a complicated physical process that is hard to capture in models and, for a long time, studies of global droughts only focused on precipitation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just really wasn\u2019t detailed enough,\u201d Dr. Gebrechorkos said, likening it to trying to balance a checkbook while only looking at income and leaving out expenses.<\/p>\n

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Higher temperatures caused by climate change are driving complex processes that make droughts bigger and more severe, new research shows.Look down from a plane at farms in the Great Plains and the West and you\u2019ll see green circles dotting the countryside, a kind of agricultural pointillism.They\u2019re from center-pivot sprinklers. But some farmers are finding older versions of these systems, many built 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, aren\u2019t keeping up with today\u2019s hotter reality, said Meetpal Kukal, an agricultural hydrologist at the University of Idaho. \u201cThere\u2019s a gap between how much water you can apply and what the crop demands are,\u201d he said.By the time the sprinkler\u2019s arm swings back around to its starting point, the soil has nearly dried out. The main culprit? Atmospheric thirst.\u201cA hotter world is a thirstier one,\u201d said Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford. He led a new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, which found that atmospheric thirst, a factor that fills in some of the blanks in our understanding of drought, over the last four decades has made droughts more frequent, more intense and has caused them cover larger areas.In general, droughts happen when there\u2019s an imbalance between water supply and demand.Rain delivers water to the surface. The atmosphere removes water from the surface through evaporation, with temperature, wind, humidity and radiation from the sun controlling how much water is evaporated. It\u2019s a complicated physical process that is hard to capture in models and, for a long time, studies of global droughts only focused on precipitation.\u201cIt just really wasn\u2019t detailed enough,\u201d Dr. Gebrechorkos said, likening it to trying to balance a checkbook while only looking at income and leaving out expenses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29030,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29028"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29031,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29028\/revisions\/29031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}