January 4 (UPI) – The planet’s dry land is not getting drier due to global warming, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Scientists have found that a few key moisture-environmental feedback methods prevent the Earth’s dry land from becoming more acidic.
Because warmer air can hold more water – accelerating evacuation across arable landscapes and encouraging rainfall over wetlands – most scientists believed that climate change would make the Earth’s arid regions more fertile. dry and its wet areas becoming wetter.
However, some of the more sophisticated climate models, known as connected climate models, have shown that dry regions are unlikely to be drier in the short term. Until now, scientists have not understood the contradiction.
To find out why the “dry-get-dry and wet-get-wet” theory didn’t work, researchers conducted several soil moisture experiments in their laboratory.
When scientists used statistical models to explain their observations, they found long-term changes in soil moisture and associated soil moisture-related foods boast an unpredictable effect on water availability in soil. tioram.
“These life foods play a more important role than has been achieved in long-term surface water changes,” study lead author Sha Zhou said in a press release.
“As soil moisture differences adversely affect water access, this negative feedback could also be reduced to a degree driven by warming in very high and extremely low hydroclimatic events and frequency. , such as droughts and floods, “said Zhou, a postdoctoral fellow at Lamont -Dorty Earth Observatory and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Without the negative feedback, Zhou said, the planet may see droughts and floods more often and worse.
When scientists used what they learned about humidifier airborne foods to predict the future of surface water under different global warming conditions, they found that dry areas across oceans tend to become drier.
But the models showed that dry land is unlikely to grow but slightly drier in the coming decades.
The contradiction is best explained by the negative impact of climate change on soil moisture, the researchers said.
New research has shown that declining soil moisture levels over the Earth’s dry land tend to reduce evapotranspiration and evaporative cooling, both of which contribute to drying patterns.
With less of both appliances working, dry surfaces are likely to heat up faster than wetter and marine areas.
This is likely to strengthen air pressure differences between ocean and land and increase winds that carry water valves from ocean to land, researchers said.
“Our work finds that the prediction of soil moisture and associated airborne nutrients is highly variable and model-dependent,” said co-author Pierre Gentine.
“This study confirms the urgent need to develop future soil moisture predictions and to represent ground-moisture atmospheric foods in models, which are crucial for the provision of pre- reliable reporting of dry water access for better water resource management, “said Gentine, an engineer at Columbia ‘s Earth.