NASA Study Sees Earth's Water Cycle Pulse Quickening

Monsoonal rains triggered extensive flooding throughout Pakistan in the summer of 2010, as depicted in this Aug. 18 image from the ASTER instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft.

Scientists predict a speedup in Earth's water cycle will lead to increased precipitation in Earth's tropics, with heavier, more punishing storms. Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Freshwater is flowing into Earth's ocean in greater amounts every year, thanks to more frequent and extreme storms related to global warming, according to a first-of-its-kind study by a team of NASA and university researchers.

The team, led by Tajdarul Syed of the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, India, and formerly with the University of California, Irvine, used NASA ASTER and other world-scale satellite observations to track total water volume flowing from the continents into the ocean each month. They found 18 percent more water fed into the world's ocean from rivers and melting polar ice sheets in 2006 than in 1994.

The average annual rise was 1.5 percent.