New data from NASA satellites show that the wettest regions of the world are getting wetter, while drier regions are getting drier, reports The Desert Sun. The study, which used data from 2002 to 2014, predicts that the upper Missouri River basin, the northern Amazon and certain regions of Africa and the tropics can expect increasing amounts of rain. However, the Middle East and North Africa, parts of India, and much of the southern and western United States will receive far less precipitation in the years ahead.
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of California, Irvine, published their findings in the journal Science last month. The study’s co-author, Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at UC Irvine warned that of an “emerging class of ‘haves’ and “have-nots.”
“When combined with our previous work on groundwater depletion, we are revealing a global disaster in the making, yet we are seeing very little coordinated response,” said Famiglietti. The team’s findings will likely affect current sea-level rise estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The NASA findings offer new information on how storms and weather patterns like La Niña and El Niño affect sea level. Overall in the last 12 years, there has been an increase in rain over land.
A separate study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research backed up the NASA results. Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the former study relies on more than 35 years of weather data from the American Southwest to show that the region is seeing less rainfall.