Whether Land Gets Wetter or Drier Depends on Latitude

A study from Lanzhou University reports that whether land has grown wetter or drier since the coldest point of the last ice age has depended on latitude, and projects that continued warming is likely to widen the gap. Zhansen Zhang, Yu Li and colleagues paired global climate simulations with records of past climate to reconstruct how moisture over land has changed since the Last Glacial Maximum.

The authors write that working out which regions wet and which dry under global warming remains difficult. Their paper appeared Oct. 3, 2026, in Communications Earth & Environment. They also project that continued warming is likely to strengthen the difference between drying and wetting regions and expand water stress in vulnerable drylands.

The reconstruction has three parts. High northern latitudes grew steadily wetter from the Last Glacial Maximum to the pre-industrial period. Many regions governed by the mid-latitude westerly winds were wetter during cold periods instead, while low-latitude monsoon regions were generally wetter during warm ones. The authors trace those contrasts to seasonal shifts in rainfall and evaporation, and to changes in atmospheric circulation driven by changing ice sheets, greenhouse gas levels and incoming sunlight.

The paper also reports the same latitude-by-latitude structure in modern observations. The forward half of the work is model output rather than measurement: the future simulations project drying across many subtropical and mid-latitude regions, with wetting at high latitudes and in the monsoon regions.

The paper is open access. Its funding statement names a Ministry of Education of China program and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.