If an area that usually gets a lot of rain during the rainy season is getting less and less rain each year, where is that water going? Is it landing somewhere else or is it evaporating into the atmosphere permanently?
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It’s in other parts of the world.
For example, it could simply be raining into the ocean where it provides no benefits to anything on land.
Or it could be getting caught up in snowfields, glaciers, and ice caps (though that’s unlikely given the current state of things).
It tends to fall down elsewhere on the planet. In general we have bands of different weather on the planet. It is humid and hot around the equator, then dry and hot further away, then wet and temperate followed by wet and cold further away and finally on the poles it is cold and dry. But these bands shift north during the northern summer and south during the northern winter. An area which would lie between a wet and dry area would therefore experience a rainy season and a dry season every year. Areas just on the other side of the band would experience opposite seasons.
Generally it is a result in a change in the direction of the prevailing wind, so raining over another piece of land or over the oceans.
Somewhere else. Oceans, other areas, like many areas from Korea, Pakistan, and Southern US all has deadly flooding this year.
It can also fall as a different form of precipitation.
Snow melts slowly and will produce a consistent source into summer, but if it’s warmer and falls as rain, then it just flows as water. This can lead to higher water levels in downstream areas and also drier conditions during the summer.
In the ocean, mainly. Not in the atmosphere: if all the precipitable water in the atmosphere were to rain out it’d be a layer just a few centimeters thick.
Adding on to the other good answers so far:
There is no such thing as “into the air permanently”. The atmosphere isn’t gaining/retaining water. All the water that evaporates still falls down somewhere eventually. When a region’s rain patterns change (such as a dry or wet season), it’s just the location of the rain that’s changing. In a dry season, that rain just fell somewhere else, perhaps directly back into the ocean. In a wet season, rain that might normally have fallen somewhere else has fallen on your area instead.
Yes it rains somewhere else. This is why when people talk about the rain cycle being a closed loop it really doesn’t work that way at the regional level. Only in a global scale.
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