Climate projections suggest an increase in drought frequency and intensity in various places over the globe, one of them being Southern Europe, expected to become a hotspot. However, 2018 presented an anomaly with the emergence of a rare “water seesaw” phenomenon, leading to severe drought in Central and Northern Europe while Southern Europe experienced high humidity. This unexpected event resulted in significant agricultural disparities, emphasizing the influence of interannual variability. The commentary underscores the danger of overlooking short-term climate variability, vital for accurate adaptation planning, especially for vulnerable regions, when focusing solely on long-term trends. This case serves as a motivation for exploration of global atmospheric circulation changes, emphasizing the need for nuanced modeling approaches to grasp subtle complexities in climate predictions and considering short-term climate variability alongside long-term trends.

The difference between precipitation and evaporation has been extensively used to characterize the water cycle’s response to global warming. However, when it comes to the global scale, the information provided by this metric is inconclusive. Herein, we discuss how the sum of precipitation and evaporation could complement the assessment of global water cycle intensification. To support our argument, we present a brief yet robust correlation analysis of both metrics in four reanalysis data sets (20CR v3, ERA-20C, ERA5, and NCEP/NCAR R1). Additionally, by combining the two metrics, we investigate how well the global water cycle fluxes are represented in the four reanalyses. Among them, we observe four different responses to the temperature increase between 1950-2010, with ERA5 showing the best agreement with the intensification hypothesis. We argue that these discrepancies would remain elusive with the traditional approach, which makes the utilization of the sum of precipitation and evaporation a valuable addition to our methodological toolbox for the assessment of the global water cycle intensification.