Currently — June 15th, 2022

July 14, 2022

What you need to know, currently.

As heat waves sweep across the globe, inland lake evaporation is increasing, according to a new NASA-funded study in Nature Communications. Researchers studied more than 1.42 million lakes around the planet and found that between 1985 and 2018, average annual evaporation had increased at a rate of 3.12 cubic kilometers per year.

This seems fairly obvious if you’ve been following the news of bodies emerging from ever-shrinking Lake Mead, but because lakes and oceans make the bottom of the hydrological cycle having accurate data on evaporation helps scientists to better predict future weather patterns and direct water resources.

“From a global perspective,” study author Gang Zhao told NASA, “the total reservoir evaporation can be larger than the combined use of domestic and industrial water...This suggests that reservoir evaporation is an indispensable factor in water management, especially in times of drought and global warming.”