A re-examination of the dry gets drier and wet gets wetter paradigm over global land: insight from terrestrial water storage changes

Abstract

Abstract. The “dry gets drier and wet gets wetter” (DDWW) paradigm has been widely used to summarise the expected trends of the global hydrologic cycle under climate change. However, the paradigm is challenged over land due to the choice of different metrics and datasets used and is still unexplored from the perspective of terrestrial water storage anomaly (TWSA). Considering the essential role of TWSA in wetting and drying of the land system, here we built upon a large ensemble of TWSA datasets, including satellite-based products, global hydrological models, land surface models, and global climate models to evaluate the DDWW hypothesis during the historical (1985–2014) and future (2071–2100) periods under various scenarios with a 0.05 significance level. We find that 28.1 % of global land confirms the DDWW paradigm, while 23.3 % of the area shows the opposite pattern during the historical period. In the future, the DDWW paradigm is still challenged with the percentage supporting the pattern lower than 20 %, and both the DDWW-validated and DDWW-opposed proportion increase along with the intensification of emission scenarios. The different choices of data sources and varying significance levels (0.01–0.1) have subtle influences on the evaluation results of the DDWW paradigm. Our findings will provide insights and implications for global wetting and drying trends from the perspective of TWSA under climate change.

Hydrogeophysical modeling of the groundwater aquifer units under climate variability in parts of Peninsular Malaysia: A case study of the climate-water nexus approach to sustainability

“…Refs. [ 22 , 25 , [31] , [32] , [33] , [34] , [35] ]. Great challenges have been confronting the physical modelling of groundwater aquifers due to insufficient continuous in-situ data representing the heterogeneity aquifer systems, or longer periods of observations in many parts of the world as reported by Ref.…”