\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNASA Scientists Find New Human-Caused Shifts in Global Water Cycle\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h1>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/deathvalleynps.jpeg?w=1500\")
<\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\nCracked mud and salt on the valley floor in Death Valley National Park in California can become a reflective pool after rains. (File photo)<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\tCredits: <\/span>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tNPS\/Kurt Moses<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\nIn a recently published paper, NASA scientists use nearly 20 years of observations to show that the global water cycle is shifting in unprecedented ways. The majority of those shifts are driven by activities such as agriculture and could have impacts on ecosystems and water management, especially in certain regions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe established with data assimilation that human intervention in the global water cycle is more significant than we thought,\u201d said Sujay Kumar, a research scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/a> in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\nThe shifts have implications for people all over the world. Water management practices, such as designing infrastructure for floods or developing drought indicators for early warning systems, are often based on assumptions that the water cycle fluctuates only within a certain range, said Wanshu Nie, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and lead author of the paper.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis may no longer hold true for some regions,\u201d Nie said. \u201cWe hope that this research will serve as a guide map for improving how we assess water resources variability and plan for sustainable resource management, especially in areas where these changes are most significant.\u201d<\/p>\n
One example of the human impacts on the water cycle is in North China, which is experiencing an ongoing drought. But vegetation in many areas continues to thrive, partially because producers continue to irrigate their land by pumping more water from groundwater storage, Kumar said. Such interrelated human interventions often lead to complex effects on other water cycle variables, such as evapotranspiration and runoff.<\/p>\n
Nie and her colleagues focused on three different kinds of shifts or changes in the cycle: first, a trend, such as a decrease in water in a groundwater reservoir; second, a shift in seasonality, like the typical growing season starting earlier in the year, or an earlier snowmelt; and third a change in extreme events, like \u201c100-year floods\u201d happening more frequently.<\/p>\n
The scientists gathered remote sensing data from 2003 to 2020 from several different NASA satellite sources: the Global Precipitation Measurement mission satellite for precipitation data, a soil moisture dataset from the European Space Agency\u2019s Climate Change Initiative, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment<\/a> satellites for terrestrial water storage data. They also used products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer<\/a> satellite instrument to provide information on vegetation health.<\/p>\n\u201cThis paper combines several years of our team\u2019s effort in developing capabilities on satellite data analysis, allowing us to precisely simulate continental water fluxes and storages across the planet,\u201d said Augusto Getirana, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and a co-author of the paper.<\/p>\n
The study results suggest that Earth system models used to simulate the future global water cycle should evolve to integrate the ongoing effects of human activities. With more data and improved models, producers and water resource managers could understand and effectively plan for what the \u201cnew normal\u201d of their local water situation looks like, Nie said.<\/p>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\tNPS\/Kurt Moses<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
In a recently published paper, NASA scientists use nearly 20 years of observations to show that the global water cycle is shifting in unprecedented ways. The majority of those shifts are driven by activities such as agriculture and could have impacts on ecosystems and water management, especially in certain regions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe established with data assimilation that human intervention in the global water cycle is more significant than we thought,\u201d said Sujay Kumar, a research scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/a> in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n The shifts have implications for people all over the world. Water management practices, such as designing infrastructure for floods or developing drought indicators for early warning systems, are often based on assumptions that the water cycle fluctuates only within a certain range, said Wanshu Nie, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and lead author of the paper.<\/p>\n \u201cThis may no longer hold true for some regions,\u201d Nie said. \u201cWe hope that this research will serve as a guide map for improving how we assess water resources variability and plan for sustainable resource management, especially in areas where these changes are most significant.\u201d<\/p>\n One example of the human impacts on the water cycle is in North China, which is experiencing an ongoing drought. But vegetation in many areas continues to thrive, partially because producers continue to irrigate their land by pumping more water from groundwater storage, Kumar said. Such interrelated human interventions often lead to complex effects on other water cycle variables, such as evapotranspiration and runoff.<\/p>\n Nie and her colleagues focused on three different kinds of shifts or changes in the cycle: first, a trend, such as a decrease in water in a groundwater reservoir; second, a shift in seasonality, like the typical growing season starting earlier in the year, or an earlier snowmelt; and third a change in extreme events, like \u201c100-year floods\u201d happening more frequently.<\/p>\n The scientists gathered remote sensing data from 2003 to 2020 from several different NASA satellite sources: the Global Precipitation Measurement mission satellite for precipitation data, a soil moisture dataset from the European Space Agency\u2019s Climate Change Initiative, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment<\/a> satellites for terrestrial water storage data. They also used products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer<\/a> satellite instrument to provide information on vegetation health.<\/p>\n \u201cThis paper combines several years of our team\u2019s effort in developing capabilities on satellite data analysis, allowing us to precisely simulate continental water fluxes and storages across the planet,\u201d said Augusto Getirana, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and a co-author of the paper.<\/p>\n The study results suggest that Earth system models used to simulate the future global water cycle should evolve to integrate the ongoing effects of human activities. With more data and improved models, producers and water resource managers could understand and effectively plan for what the \u201cnew normal\u201d of their local water situation looks like, Nie said.<\/p>\n