
Ask HN: Where has all of the rain gone? - flyGuyOnTheSly
My grass is suffering through an unseasonally dry summer here in souther Ontario.<p>I was just reading about how Ireland is breaking records in terms of dryness.<p>And apparently sweden is experiencing heat waves as well.<p>So where is all of this water that these heat waves are sucking up getting dumped?<p>In the oceans?
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wgx
Yes, ocean levels are rising as a result of man-made climate change.

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gus_massa
No!

The raise of the sea level is not caused by the rain. It is caused by the
melting of the ice in Antarctica and Greenland, and small contribution of the
expansion of the sea water because it is hotter. Anyway, the current rise is
only a few millimeter.

All the rain (and snow) eventually goes to the sea (unless it gets frozen in a
glacier) so it doesn't matter if it rains here or there, that doesn't change
the sea level.

And remember that there is not a fixed amount of rain, some years there is
more global rain, and some years there is less global rain. Essentially, to
get rain you need that a big chunk of hot wet air collides with a big chunk of
cold air, so the humidity is transformed into clouds and later into rain (and
there are more problems, like cloud condensation nuclei, it's not so easy ...)
But anyway, how much total rain depends a lot of the circulation details,
because humidity my survive in the air for shorter or longer periods of time.

Probably you are cherrypicking some place with drains, but there are other
places with more rain and floods. Some of these are normal and caused by the
usual random fluctuations of the weather, and others can have a bigger
probability due to climate change. It's very difficult to classify them as
"normal" or "man-made".

