Obviously it’s not going to help the way stable rainfall would, but I’m in the southern US with up to 93% humidity and a dew point of 77 for going on 2 months. It seems like that could help the ground retain enough moisture to alleviate (not completely prevent) major drought, wildfires, and erosion during flash floods/storms.
In: Planetary Science
High humidity does temper brush fires, but doesn’t do all that much otherwise. And plants draw water from the soil and release that water into the air through their leaves (called transpiration) for evaporative cooling, to move water through the plant structures for various uses, etc. Very few plants draw that moisture from the air, they have to draw it from the soil. High humidity may slow the rate of transpiration, but it won’t be stopped unless the plants start dying off. So the plants continuously pull water from the soil and release it into the air, and if the soil isn’t replenished by rainfall or runoff, it’ll get drier and drier.
The high dew point also coincides with high heat, which means the air is being sucked off the surface and not returning to the ground. If the temperature never gets low enough to push the humidity back to 100% then it will never condense into liquid water (and when it finally does the air had sucked up so much water by that point it turns into a hurricane)
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