New NASA Study Shows Changing Global Hydrology Patterns

A new study in the journal Nature reports that the wet areas of the planet are getting wetter while the dry areas are getting drier. The east coast of North America is getting wetter, but already explosive areas like the Middle East and Southeast Asia are getting drier.

Some, but not all, of the change is climate driven, such as the melting ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Jay Famiglietti of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, says that the "pattern of wet-getting-wetter, dry-getting-drier during the rest of the 21st century is predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models, but we’ll need a much longer dataset to be able to definitively say whether climate change is responsible for the emergence of any similar pattern . . . .”

You can read more about the study here.