A new study shows that Earth's bodies of freshwater are getting smaller at a faster rate than we thought.
The study shows that lake evaporation plays a bigger role in the cycle than previously thought. Our climate and weather modeling can be impacted by this process.
Natural and artificial lakes cover 5 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface. Almost 90 percent of our planet's fresh surface water is contained in them.
Warming temperatures and increased solar radiation have made the sky thirsty. A decrease in ice cover has given the sky more access to slurp up water. The rapid cycling of water from its pooling on land to its dispersal into the atmosphere is a result of these factors.
The sheer volume of lake water being lost due to other dynamics like freeze and thaw cycles is not represented by the previous estimates. A reliable measure of the amount of water in each lake has to be calculated independently.
They did that for over one million lakes. They used monthly water loss information from satellites to factor in a number of variables for each lake.
The long-term lake evaporation is larger than previously thought.
The sky is drinking over 3 trillion liters more each year than it has in the past.
The combined use of domestic and industrial water can be larger than the total evaporation.
In the US, very few lakes/reservoirs have reliable data.
Those making water management decisions and the wider scientific community should use the data created by the team.
"With results for individual water bodies, GLEV can help improve the decision-making of the world's water bodies."
The data helps the science community better understand the role that water bodies play in Earth systems, from global weather forecasting to Earth system modeling under climate change.
The research was published in a journal.
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