Earth's lakes are evaporating faster than thought. Free Technical Library News

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Earth's lakes are evaporating faster than thought

06.07.2022

Scientists from the University of Texas said that the Earth's lakes are evaporating much faster than thought. And this evaporation plays a much larger role in the hydrological cycle than expected and has a significant impact on climate and weather modeling.

Natural and artificial lakes occupy approximately five million square kilometers of the Earth's area. They contain about 90% of fresh water and are home to an amazing variety of organisms.

But the increase in temperature and solar radiation associated with changes in cloud cover adversely affects the lakes. Decreasing ice cover also means that large areas of water are exposed to sunlight. All this together leads to an acceleration of the water cycle, from accumulation on land to dispersion in the atmosphere.

Previous estimates of this process have been based on evaporation rates, but these estimates alone are not sufficient to reflect the net amount of lake water lost due to other factors such as freeze and thaw cycles. Because of this dependence on local environmental conditions, a reliable evaporation rate must be calculated separately for each lake.

This is exactly what the authors of the new study did for 1,42 million lakes around the world. They used monthly satellite water loss information between 1985 and 2018 and took into account evaporation rates, surface area, ice duration, and heat storage changes for each of these lakes.

"We found that the long-term evaporation from the lake is 1500 plus or minus 150 cubic kilometers per year, which is 15,4% more than previous estimates," said Gang Zhao, lead author of the study.

That is, the sky "absorbs" three trillion liters of water more than previously thought. It also turned out that artificial reservoirs make a disproportionately larger contribution to evaporation: 16% with a capacity of 5%.

From a global perspective, lake evaporation may be higher than domestic and industrial water sharing. However, reliable data on evaporation exist for only a small number of lakes.

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