GRACE satellites measure gravity as they orbit the
planet to reveal shifting levels of water on the Earth (artist's concept).
NASA/JPL-Caltech
An international team of scientists
using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth’s
total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has
remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers
suggested the shift could indicate Earth's continents have entered a persistently drier phase.
From 2015 through 2023, satellite
measurements showed that the average amount of freshwater stored on land — that
includes liquid surface water like lakes and rivers, plus water in aquifers
underground — was 290 cubic miles (1,200 cubic km) lower than the average
levels from 2002 through 2014, said Matthew Rodell, one of the study authors
and a hydrologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“That’s two and a half times the volume of Lake Erie lost.”
During times of drought, along with
the modern expansion of irrigated agriculture, farms and cities must rely more
heavily on groundwater, which can lead to a cycle of declining underground
water supplies: freshwater supplies become depleted, rain and snow fail to
replenish them, and more groundwater is pumped. The reduction in available
water puts a strain on farmers and communities, potentially leading to famine,
conflicts, poverty, and an increased risk of disease when people turn to
contaminated water sources, according to a UN report on water stress published in 2024.
The team of researchers identified this abrupt, global decrease in freshwater using observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, operated by the German Aerospace Center, German Research Centre for Geosciences, and NASA. GRACE satellites measure fluctuations in Earth’s gravity on monthly scales that reveal changes in the mass of water on and under the ground. The original GRACE satellites flew from March 2002 to October 2017. The successor GRACE–Follow On (GRACE–FO) satellites launched in May 2018.
This map shows the years that terrestrial water
storage hit a 22-year minimum (i.e., the land was driest) at each location,
based on data from the GRACE and GRACE/FO satellites. A significantly large
portion of the global land surface reached this minimum in the nine years since
2015, which happen to be the nine warmest years in the modern temperature
record.
Image by NASA Earth Observatory/Wanmei Liang with data
courtesy of Mary Michael O’Neill
The decline in global freshwater
reported in the study began with a massive drought in northern and central
Brazil, and was followed shortly by a series of major droughts in Australasia,
South America, North America, Europe, and Africa. Warmer ocean temperatures in
the tropical Pacific from late 2014 into 2016, culminating in one of the most
significant El Niño events since 1950, led to shifts in atmospheric jet streams
that altered weather and rainfall patterns around the world. However, even
after El Niño subsided, global freshwater failed to rebound. In fact,
Rodell and team report that 13 of the world’s 30 most intense droughts observed
by GRACE occurred since January 2015. Rodell and colleagues suspect that global
warming might be contributing to the enduring freshwater depletion.
Global warming leads the atmosphere
to hold more water vapor, which results in more extreme precipitation, said
NASA Goddard meteorologist Michael Bosilovich. While total annual rain and
snowfall levels may not change dramatically, long periods between intense
precipitation events allow the soil to dry and become more compact. That
decreases the amount of water the ground can absorb when it does rain.
“The problem when you have extreme
precipitation,” Bosilovich said, “is the water ends up running off,” instead of
soaking in and replenishing groundwater stores. Globally, freshwater levels
have stayed consistently low since the 2014-2016 El Niño, while more water
remains trapped in the atmosphere as water vapor. “Warming temperatures
increase both the evaporation of water from the surface to the atmosphere, and
the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere, increasing the frequency and
intensity of drought conditions,” he noted.
While there are reasons to suspect
that the abrupt drop in freshwater is largely due to global warming, it can be
difficult to definitively link the two, said Susanna Werth, a hydrologist and
remote sensing scientist at Virginia Tech, who was not affiliated with the
study. “There are uncertainties in climate predictions,” Werth said.
“Measurements and models always come with errors.”
It remains to be seen whether
global freshwater will rebound to pre-2015 values, hold steady, or resume its
decline. Considering that the nine warmest years in the modern temperature
record coincided with the abrupt freshwater decline, Rodell said, “We don’t
think this is a coincidence, and it could be a harbinger of what’s to come.”
By James R. Riordon
NASA’s Earth Science News Team
Source: NASA Satellites Reveal Abrupt Drop in Global Freshwater Levels - NASA Science