Evidence of enhanced precipitation due to irrigation over the Great Plains of the United States

DeAngelis, Anthony M.; Domínguez, Francina; Fan, Ying; Robock, Alan; Kustu, M. D.; Robinson, David A.

doi:10.1029/2010jd013892

Cited by 258 publications

(263 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Globally, around half of pumped groundwater for irrigation is used by plants, whereas the remainder possibly flows to the ocean as runoff causing SLR; evaporates into the atmosphere increasing water vapour content; returns back to the aquifers through groundwater recharge; or affects the atmospheric circulation owing to surface energy modifications and changes the precipitation intensity or pattern locally, regionally and globally 9,27,28 . In this study, we used the state-of-the-art fully coupled NCAR CESM 11 version 1.0.3 to simulate the fate of water pumped from groundwater and calculate the relative proportion of GWD to the sea-level changes.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, they did not take into account land-atmospheric-ocean feedback, such that it was assumed that all depleted groundwater would end up in the ocean. However, recent studies [27][28][29] indicate that the irrigation water supply from groundwater and surface water enhance regional precipitation owing to the increased soil moisture and evaporation over the downwind regions. This warrants re-appraisal of the contribution of GWD to SLR for the validation of the critical assumptions in the IPCC AR5 report as mentioned above.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Fate of water pumped from underground and contributions to sea-level rise

et al. 2016

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The contributions from terrestrial water sources to sea-level rise, other than ice caps and glaciers, are highly uncertain and heavily debated 1-5 . Recent assessments indicate that groundwater depletion (GWD) may become the most important positive terrestrial contribution 6-10 over the next 50 years, probably equal in magnitude to the current contributions from glaciers and ice caps 6 . However, the existing estimates assume that nearly 100% of groundwater extracted eventually ends up in the oceans. Owing to limited knowledge of the pathways and mechanisms governing the ultimate fate of pumped groundwater, the relative fraction of global GWD that contributes to sea-level rise remains unknown. Here, using a coupled climate-hydrological model 11,12 simulation, we show that only 80% of GWD ends up in the ocean. An increase in runo to the ocean accounts for roughly two-thirds, whereas the remainder results from the enhanced net flux of precipitation minus evaporation over the ocean, due to increased atmospheric vapour transport from the land to the ocean. The contribution of GWD to global sea-level rise amounted to 0.02 (±0.004) mm yr −1 in 1900 and increased to 0.27 (±0.04) mm yr −1 in 2000. This indicates that existing studies have substantially overestimated the contribution of GWD to global sea-level rise by a cumulative amount of at least 10 mm during the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. With other terrestrial water contributions included, we estimate the net terrestrial water contribution during the period 1993-2010 to be +0.12 (±0.04) mm yr −1 , suggesting that the net terrestrial water contribution reported in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report report is probably overestimated by a factor of three.Sea-level rise (SLR) is a direct effect of climate change, through the thermal expansion of ocean waters and the contribution of melt water from ice sheets, ice caps and glaciers. In an initial assessment 13 , the net contribution of sub-polar terrestrial water storage change to global sea-level variation was highly uncertain and heavily debated [14][15][16][17][18]

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Fate of water pumped from underground and contributions to sea-level rise

et al. 2016

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“…Recent global changes resulting from warming-associated increases in saturation vapor pressure have been observed in satellite and reanalysis data (1,2). Regional impacts related to large-scale land use change are detectible in precipitation data and models (3)(4)(5). Humidity anomalies (both positive and negative) have been observed in many urban centers and associated with changes in land cover, direct anthropogenic sources, and interaction of evapotranspiration and condensation processes with the urban heat island effect (6)(7)(8)(9)(10).…”

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confidence: 97%

Vapor hydrogen and oxygen isotopes reflect water of combustion in the urban atmosphere

Gorski¹,

Strong²,

Good³

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Anthropogenic modification of the water cycle involves a diversity of processes, many of which have been studied intensively using models and observations. Effective tools for measuring the contribution and fate of combustion-derived water vapor in the atmosphere are lacking, however, and this flux has received relatively little attention. We provide theoretical estimates and a first set of measurements demonstrating that water of combustion is characterized by a distinctive combination of H and O isotope ratios. We show that during periods of relatively low humidity and/or atmospheric stagnation, this isotopic signature can be used to quantify the concentration of water of combustion in the atmospheric boundary layer over Salt Lake City. Combustion-derived vapor concentrations vary between periods of atmospheric stratification and mixing, both on multiday and diurnal timescales, and respond over periods of hours to variations in surface emissions. Our estimates suggest that up to 13% of the boundary layer vapor during the period of study was derived from combustion sources, and both the temporal pattern and magnitude of this contribution were closely reproduced by an independent atmospheric model forced with a fossil fuel emissions data product. Our findings suggest potential for water vapor isotope ratio measurements to be used in conjunction with other tracers to refine the apportionment of urban emissions, and imply that water vapor emissions associated with combustion may be a significant component of the water budget of the urban boundary layer, with potential implications for urban climate, ecohydrology, and photochemistry. A nthropogenic perturbation of the atmospheric water cycle is expressed over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Recent global changes resulting from warming-associated increases in saturation vapor pressure have been observed in satellite and reanalysis data (1, 2). Regional impacts related to large-scale land use change are detectible in precipitation data and models (3-5). Humidity anomalies (both positive and negative) have been observed in many urban centers and associated with changes in land cover, direct anthropogenic sources, and interaction of evapotranspiration and condensation processes with the urban heat island effect (6-10).Fossil fuel combustion releases water vapor to the atmosphere. Assuming an average molar ratio of H 2 O to CO 2 emission of 1.5 (see Water of Combustion) and current anthropogenic carbon emission rates of 9.5 Pg C/y (11), global combustion vapor emissions total ∼21 Pg/y. At the global scale, these numbers are four orders of magnitude smaller than the gross global exchange of water vapor between the Earth surface and the atmosphere, which totals more than 480,000 Pg/y (12). However, anthropogenic emissions are highly concentrated in space and time and, locally, may be a significant source of vapor and impact atmospheric water cycling, ambient humidity, and photochemistry. Water of combustion has been hypothesized to be an important contributor...

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“…The explosion of research activity in interdisciplinary subfields of hydrology-ecohydrology (Smettem, 2008;Rodriguez-Iturbe, 2000), eco-geomorphology (Wheaton et al, 2011), eco-hydraulics (Nepf, 2012), hydro-climatology (DeAngelis et al, 2010), hydro-pedology (Lin et al, 2005), and socio-hydrology (Sivapalan et al, 2012) subsystems. However it is unclear whether the processes generally targeted by interdisciplinary hydrology describe all relevant interactions exhaustively.…”

Section: Challenge 2: Identifying Describing and Accounting For Feedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing predictive insight into changing water systems: use-inspired hydrologic science for the Anthropocene

Thompson

Sivapalan

Harman

et al. 2013

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

130

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Abstract.Globally, many different kinds of water resources management issues call for policy-and infrastructure-based responses. Yet responsible decision-making about water resources management raises a fundamental challenge for hydrologists: making predictions about water resources on decadal-to century-long timescales. Obtaining insight into hydrologic futures over 100 yr timescales forces researchers to address internal and exogenous changes in the properties of hydrologic systems. To do this, new hydrologic research must identify, describe and model feedbacks between water and other changing, coupled environmental subsystems. These models must be constrained to yield useful insights, despite the many likely sources of uncertainty in their predictions. Chief among these uncertainties are the impacts of the increasing role of human intervention in the global water cycle -a defining challenge for hydrology in the Anthropocene. Here we present a research agenda that proposes a suite of strategies to address these challenges from the perspectives of hydrologic science research. The research agenda focuses on the development of co-evolutionary hydrologic modeling to explore coupling across systems, and to address the implications of this coupling on the long-time behavior of the coupled systems. Three research directions support the development of these models: hydrologic reconstruction, comparative hydrology and model-data learning. These strategies focus on understanding hydrologic processes and feedbacks over long timescales, across many locations, and through strategic coupling of observational and model data in specific systems. We highlight the value of use-inspired and team-based science that is motivated by real-world hydrologic problems but targets improvements in fundamental understanding to support decision-making and management. Fully realizing the potential of this approach will ultimately require detailed integration of social science and physical science understanding of water systems, and is a priority for the developing field of sociohydrology.

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Evidence of enhanced precipitation due to irrigation over the Great Plains of the United States

Cited by 258 publications

References 58 publications

Fate of water pumped from underground and contributions to sea-level rise

Fate of water pumped from underground and contributions to sea-level rise

Vapor hydrogen and oxygen isotopes reflect water of combustion in the urban atmosphere

Developing predictive insight into changing water systems: use-inspired hydrologic science for the Anthropocene

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