Latest Study: Humans Cause Global Water Cycle Shift

JAKARTA The latest study released by NASA scientists states that the global water cycle is shifting. The results of this study are based on remote sensing data collected for nearly 20 years.

According to NASA's explanation, this data comes from a global rainfall gauge satellite, a soil humidity monitor belonging to the European Space Agency (ESA), and a gravitational recovery satellite and climate experiments. All of this data was taken between 2003 and 2020.

The water cycle is changing in an unprecedented way. Sujay Kumar, one of the researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, explained that most of the changes were due to human action.

"We establish through data assimilation that human intervention in the global water cycle is more significant than we expected," Kumar said. The researcher said that this water cycle was affected by agricultural activities and water management.

The global shift in the water cycle has had a very serious impact. One example is the region of North China which is currently experiencing drought. However, on the other hand, vegetation in some areas actually grew very large.

This can happen because manufacturers continue to irrigate land by pumping more water in the ground storage space. Interventions like this are considered detrimental because the impact becomes complex, there can be evapotranspiration or even runoff.

So far, there have been three shifts that Kumar and his colleagues have detected. The first is the trend of water decline in groundwater reservoirs, the second is the occurrence of seasonal shifts such as the earlier planting season, and the third is extreme events such as 100-year floods that occur more frequently.

"We hope this research will serve as a guiding map to improve the way we assess water resource variability and plan sustainable resource management, especially in areas that have undergone the most significant changes," said Wanshu Nie, Kumar's research partner.