Study: Summer is Getting Longer

Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer, LiveScience.com

Thu Aug 31, 8:00 AM ET

The lines between seasons are blurring and summer is getting longer in North America, a new study indicates.

Tracing backwards every known rainfall event on the globe, for a 25-year period ending in 2003, scientists wanted to determine where the moisture that supplied each rainfall came from.

While doing that, they found remarkable trends in what they call recycling over that time period, said study co-author, Paul Dirmeyer from the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies in Calverton, MD.

Precipitation recycling is the fraction of rain falling over a particular area that originated as evaporation from that same area.