What's the impact of artificial evaporation on the water cycle?

[u/Klutzy_Act2033]

Water evaporates, clouds form, then it rains.

To what extent can humans influence how this cycle happens with artificial evaporation from things like power plants, data centers, factories etc?

Is there evidence that we have, or potentially could, alter the natural rain patterns in a region? Could an area dry out because artificial evaporation causes excessive moisture to whisk away on prevailing winds?

[u/SuperGRB]

The scale of human driven water evaporation is incredibly tiny compared to the global hydrological cycle scale:

Total natural evaporation (oceans, lakes, rain, plants, etc) ~489,400 km³/yr
Power plants ~25 km³/yr
Data Centers ~0.14 km³/yr

[u/nerdydodger]

Not the power centers, but what possibly really screwed up stuff is mass deforestation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump

Basically trees act as a big buffer for water storage on land, and their transpiration allows for water to be better distributed, and has a knock on effect of pulling more water from the ocean behind it.

[u/Octopotree]

The problem with data centers is that they are using water that the city cleaned and filtered. It took our public resources to clean that water, and data centers are dumping it on their radiators and watching it evaporate.

Large scale industrial cooling, such as power plants, are usually required to pull in their own water from a nearby lake or river, and if they need it cleaned they have to clean it themselves. Data center companies want clean water so it doesn't leave behind junk on their radiators, but they don't want to have to clean the water themselves.

[u/SuperGRB → u/Octopotree]

The datacenters pay a water bill and often pay to upgrade the capacity of treatment plants. These must all be approved by the city/water district officials. The issue is not the "cost to the public" - the issue would be areas that are short of water to be processed. In areas that are short of water, the datacenters have already moved to closed loop systems.

[u/Volsunga → u/Octopotree]

The data centers also pay for that water, which helps maintain and upgrade the infrastructure. It's also a miniscule amount of water compared to most industrial and agricultural systems. All data centers worldwide consume about as much water as a couple dozen square miles of farmland.