Latest news with #MeetpalKukal
New York Times
6 days ago
- Climate
- New York Times
It's Not Just Poor Rains Causing Drought. The Atmosphere Is ‘Thirstier.'
Look down from a plane at farms in the Great Plains and the West and you'll see green circles dotting the countryside, a kind of agricultural pointillism. They're from center-pivot sprinklers. But some farmers are finding older versions of these systems, many built 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, aren't keeping up with today's hotter reality, said Meetpal Kukal, an agricultural hydrologist at the University of Idaho. 'There's a gap between how much water you can apply and what the crop demands are,' he said. By the time the sprinkler's arm swings back around to its starting point, the soil has nearly dried out. The main culprit? Atmospheric thirst. 'A hotter world is a thirstier one,' 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's 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's a complicated physical process that is hard to capture in models and, for a long time, studies of global droughts only focused on precipitation. 'It just really wasn't detailed enough,' Dr. Gebrechorkos said, likening it to trying to balance a checkbook while only looking at income and leaving out expenses. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Growing Risk of 'Thirstwaves' as the Planet Warms
The atmosphere is getting thirstier. A new study finds that warming is leading to more frequent bouts of hot, dry weather that cause soils to lose large volumes of water to evaporation. The growing number of 'thirstwaves' poses a challenge to farmers, researchers say. 'As these pressures grow, there's less and less room for guesswork in irrigation, so if you are under limited water conditions, you've got to do a better job at really tracking your water,' said lead author Meetpal Kukal, of the University of Idaho. Researchers define a 'thirstwave' as three days in a row of unusually high 'evaporative demand' — that is, when hot, dry, sunny conditions cause the atmosphere to draw more water from plants, soils, and waterways. For the new study, researchers analyzed four decades of thirstwaves across the U.S. They found that, since 1980, thirstwaves have gotten 7 percent longer, 17 percent more intense, and 23 percent more frequent, and are also increasingly arising during the growing season. The study, published in Earth's Future, follows on a recent paper in Nature Reviews that likened the atmosphere to an enormous sponge. As the planet warms, authors wrote, the sponge is growing larger and soaking up more moisture, leading to severe drought, and also unleashing more water, leading to intense rainfall. The result is sharper swings from dry to wet. The effect is worldwide, authors found. Weather 'whiplash,' said lead author Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, 'may turn out to be one of the more universal global changes on a warming Earth.' Whiplash: How Big Swings in Precipitation Fueled the L.A. Fires
