Stronger hurricanes: Warmer ocean surface waters can intensify hurricanes and tropical storms, leading to more hazardous conditions as these storms make landfall.This is bad news for farmers who can expect fewer crops in these conditions.

Places prone to drought are expected to become even drier over the next century. More extreme drought: Warmer temperatures cause more evaporation, turning water into vapor in the air, and causing drought in some areas of the world.This can cause flooding – a risk to the environment and human health.

More rain and flooding: With more evaporation, there is more water in the air so storms can produce more intense rainfall events in some areas.

These extreme weather events can have impacts on human health, limiting access to clean drinking water, food, and shelter and taxing people’s ability to cope with heat, drought or flood. In particular, it is causing more extreme weather events than we have seen in the past. NOAA Changing climate means changing weather.Ĭlimate warming is causing changes to weather in different regions of the world. Mudcracks form during droughts when the ground dries out and moisture evaporates. This could lead to increased transpiration, the release of water vapor into the air by plants as a result of photosynthesis. Warmer temperatures associated with climate change and increased carbon dioxide levels may speed plant growth in regions with ample moisture and nutrients.

Also, some models forecast more evaporation and rainfall over oceans, but not necessarily over land. Some climate models predict that coastal regions will become wetter and the middle of continents will become drier. Some areas may experience heavier than normal precipitation, and other areas may become prone to droughts, as the traditional locations of rain belts and deserts shift in response to a changing climate. Higher evaporation and precipitation rates are not evenly distributed around the world. We are already seeing impacts of higher evaporation and precipitation rates, and the impacts are expected to increase over this century as climate warms. More evaporation is causing more precipitation, on average. Climate change affects evaporation and precipitation.Ĭlimate change is likely causing parts of the water cycle to speed up as warming global temperatures increase the rate of evaporation worldwide. Below are examples of some changes that are happening as global temperatures rise. It moves from place to place through the water cycle, which is changing as climate changes. Water is in the atmosphere, on the land, in the ocean, and underground. And the water you see in a river or stream may have been snow on a high mountaintop. Rain falling today may have been water in a distant ocean days before.

The earth sea cycle