The evaporation of lakes affects the climate and weather on the planet.
Scientists from the University of Texas stated that Earth's lakes are evaporating much faster than previously thought. And this evaporation plays a much larger role in the hydrologic cycle than previously thought, and significantly affects climate and weather modeling, Science Alert reports.
Natural and man-made lakes occupy approximately five million square kilometers of Earth's surface. They contain about 90% of fresh water and are home to an amazing variety of organisms.
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But rising temperatures and solar radiation associated with changes in cloud cover have a negative impact on lakes. Shrinking 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 were based on evaporation rates, but these estimates alone are insufficient to reflect the net amount of lake water loss due to other factors, such as freeze-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 a new study did for 1.42 million lakes around the world. They used monthly water loss data from satellites between 1985 and 2018 and took into account evaporation rates, surface area, ice age and heat storage changes for each of these lakes.
“We found that long-term evaporation from the lake is 1,500 plus or minus 150 cubic kilometers per year, which is 15.4% more than previous estimates,” said the lead author of the study Gang Zhao.
That is, the sky “absorbs” three trillion liters more water than previously thought. It also turned out that artificial reservoirs make a disproportionately larger contribution to evaporation: 16% with a capacity of 5%.
According to scientists, from a global perspective, evaporation from lakes can be higher than the combined use of water for domestic and industrial purposes needs Meanwhile, reliable evaporation data exist for only a small number of lakes.
Zhao and team have made their dataset publicly available and encourage water management decision-makers and the wider scientific community to use it. Researchers believe that these data will help to better understand the role of lakes in the Earth's ecosystem and develop more reliable models of global warming.
