Climate change has altered the water cycle in the Upper Mississippi River Basin, producing rainier summers that send more runoff into the river (pictured).
Chris Frans at the University of Washington in Seattle and his team studied data from 1918 to 2007 and report that increasing precipitation during July and August, especially in the northwestern part of the region, raised stream flows in the Upper Mississippi.
Hydrological modelling showed that although an expansion in the amount of land cleared for agriculture did increase runoff in some parts of the basin, these changes were not enough to explain the overall trend.
The findings suggest that climate change could hamper efforts to reduce the flow of nitrogen-rich runoff from the river into the Gulf of Mexico, where the nutrients create low-oxygen 'dead zones'.
Geophys. Res. Lett. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/grl.50262 (2013).
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More rain for the Central Plains. Nature 496, 141 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/496141d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/496141d
