Over the past 18 years, a nine-centimetre layer of water has been “lost” in Slovakia, the Institute for Environmental Policy wrote on Facebook.
Their statement is based on data from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the SITA newswire reported.
NASA has developed an analytical tool that can use satellite measurements of gravity to determine the amount of water in a selected area and compare it with the amount of water in the past.
The loss of water is not determined based on photos of the Earth's surface, but rather by the power of gravity on the Earth's surface. At places where water is evaporating, satellites marked lower gravity power.
More water evaporating into atmosphere
With the data tool, it is possible to choose a rectangle of area, not the border of the country, explains IEP analyst Martin Gális. For Slovakia, analysts, therefore, stated the coordinates of extreme points as an area of interest.
“The resulting data speaks of the loss of water from the landscape, soil, vegetation, forest and grasslands, not only from watercourses, reservoirs and lakes. As a result, a nine-centimetre layer of water evaporated from the region of Slovakia, not within the exact boundaries, but in an imaginary rectangle,” Gális said, as quoted by SITA.
At the same time, NASA's analytical tool has shown that more and more water is evaporating into the atmosphere due to global warming.
While in 2003, approximately 4.05 centimetres of terrestrial water vaporised into the atmosphere worldwide, in 2019, it was 4.44 centimetres per year. Over the course of 16 years, the amount of evaporated water has increased by 10 percent.
