Look down from a plane at farms in the Great Plains and the West and you’ll see green circles dotting the countryside, a kind of agricultural pointillism. They’re from center-pivot irrigation systems. But some farmers are finding older versions, many built 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, aren’t keeping up with today’s hotter reality. … By the time the sprinkler’s arm swings back around to its starting point, the soil has nearly dried out. The main culprit? Atmospheric thirst. “A hotter world is a thirstier one,” said Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford. He led a new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, which found that atmospheric thirst, a factor that fills in some of the blanks in our understanding of drought, over the last four decades has made droughts more frequent, more intense and has caused them cover larger areas.

Other drought news:

• Nature: Study: Warming accelerates global drought severity
• Phys.org: The atmosphere’s growing thirst is making droughts worse, even where it rains​
• Colorado State University: News release: Drought-resilient plant holds promise for future food production, study finds