What impacts does global warming have on the various processes of the water cycle??

Question

Global warming impact on the water cycle: Condensation, infiltration, evaporation, percipitation, runoff.

What are the relationship

Answer 1

First the effect is to reduce cloud formation with a given amount of water in the air. This then causes a total increase in water vapour remaining in the air, and of course water vapour is our most important Greenhouse gas... trapping more heat.

As more heat is trapped, we get more evaporation.

More evaporation means that there is much more energy in the volume of water vapour, so that when it begins to condense, larger energy is released, causing much more vigorous storms that will drop far more water than would be dropped if cloud formation were starting with less water in the air.

The process of evaporation does cool the oceans, but the effect on the air where a storm is occurring is to dump enormous amounts of heat into the upper  troposphere. So we again reduce the amount of cloud formation  because most of the heat returns to the air.

Yet because we have longer periods without cloud cover, we get longer periods of insolation of the oceans, more energy there ready to trigger evaporation.

The land too dries out more readily, but the large volumes of rainfall if not well distributed, produce major floods, major snow falls.

Answer 2

One consequence could be the melting of glaciers, and the disappearance of snow cover in places in the world where people depend on the melt from these for their water supply.  Most of California's water comes from snowmelt from the Sierras for instance.  Huge populations in Asia depend on the runoff from the Himalayas.

Answer 3

All of the information that yo want can be found in the IPCC reports, specifically Chapter 3 of Working Group II Report:

http://tinyurl.com/2qlhds