Question: how is climate change affecting the water cycle?

Oliver Andrews answered on 15 Mar 2019:

Hi Ruth, good question!
The simple explanation of this (although there is some uncertainty) is that the hydrological cycle (water cycle) gets more intense under climate change. And regions that are normally “wet” get wetter, and regions that are dry get “drier”. Things like rainfall can be very difficult to calculate accurately in our computer models though, because it varies a lot over very small scales (think about the weather forecast!).