Water Cycle Extremes 2002-2024: Droughts and Pluvials

  • Released Thursday, June 26, 2025
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In a study of 20 years of data from the NASA/German GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites, NASA scientists confirmed that major droughts and pluvials — periods of excessive precipitation and water storage on the landscape — have been occurring more often. They also found that the worldwide intensity of these extreme wet and dry events – a metric that combines extent, duration, and severity — is closely linked to global warming. Warmer air causes more moisture to evaporate from Earth's surface during dry events; warm air can also hold more moisture to fuel severe snow- and rainfall events.

Floods and droughts account for more than 20% of the economic losses caused by extreme weather events in the U.S. each year, ranked second after hurricanes among major disasters. The economic impacts are similar around the world, though the human toll tends to be most devastating in poor and developing nations.

This research was funded by NASA’s GRACE-FO Science Team.

This visualization shows extremes of the water cycle — droughts and pluvials — over a 23-year period (2002-2025) based on observations from the GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites. Dry events are shown as red spheres and wet events as blue spheres, with earlier years being shown as lighter shades and later years as darker shades. The volume of the sphere is proportional to the intensity of the event, a quantity measured in cubic kilometer months. A total of 1,229 extreme wet and dry events are shown the visualization.

This visualization shows extremes of the water cycle — droughts and pluvials — over a 23-year period (2002-2024) based on observations from the GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites. Dry events are shown as red spheres and wet events as blue spheres, with earlier years being shown as lighter shades and later years as darker shades. The volume of the sphere is proportional to the intensity of the event, a quantity measured in cubic kilometer months. This version only shows North America.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Related papers

Rodell, M., and B. Li, 2023: Changing intensity of hydroclimatic extreme events revealed by GRACE and GRACE-FO, Nature Water, doi:10.1038/s44221-023-00040-5. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-023-00040-5

Citing this page

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15922517

This page was originally published on Thursday, June 26, 2025.
This page was last updated on Friday, June 27, 2025 at 9:45 AM EDT.