History doesn’t always repeat. As our climate continues to change, established patterns are shifting. Sea ice is declining while oceans are rising and getting warmer. Maps can help us detect and quantify these changes, letting us compare what we observe to what we expect.
The interactive map below from Esri tracks more than 20 years of global water cycles. It provides an interactive, historical record of hydrologic processes across our planet. You can toggle views of snowpack, moisture, runoff, and more over time.
Launch Interactive Map
With the interactive timeline, you can revisit any month since January 2000. You can see values for that point in time at the location you clicked or searched. Even better, you can see historical trends for that location by month. So you can check to see if March 2023 was wetter than normal in Southern California (it was).
The ability to replay events over time is powerful. We can understand how changes in the hydrologic cycle manifest in events like wildfires, floods, and water crises.
Consider the destructive wildfires in Australia from 2019 to 2020. Using this map, we can see evidence of below-average soil moisture before and during the fires. It helps us connect the when, where, and why.
Water is one of the most important resources on Earth. Too much water causes floods and devastates ecosystems. However, too little leads to widespread droughts and creates public health crises. To adapt to a changing climate, we’ll need to understand and predict the availability of this critical resource.
More to Explore
- Learn more about the science behind this map.
- Check out more time-enabled maps from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Land Data Assimilation System.
