Warming is making the West thirstier, researchers say. And it’s stressing water supplies
Over the past four decades, the Western U.S. has demanded more water. And the landscapes — the valleys and mountains and lakes — that make up the region’s arid ecosystems have borne the impacts of increasing water needs in more ways than one. It’s not only fast-growing cities, searching for faraway supplies, that have affected these landscapes. The atmosphere itself has become thirstier, using up, and potentially evaporating, more water from the land beneath it. Researchers describe this as increased evaporative demand …
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